Businesses with multiple departments surfacing "child" departments instead of main listings

[CarrieHill]

Earlier this month @DickHannah (Paul) posted about an issue Auto dealers were facing where the service or parts department GMBs were showing for a branded search instead of the main car dealer listing (Multiple Departments at a single address - Automotive - Local Search Forum).

It's worth noting that this is NOT captive only to automotive categories. We're seeing it for big-box retailers like Walmarts that have optical & pharmacy departments, healthcare/hospital complexes that have multiple departments/clinics that have their own GMB listings, hotels that have restaurants & spas on-site, etc.

Joy brought these other categories to the attention of Danny Sullivan this week but received the canned "we're looking at it" answer.... again.....



Are there any other categories where you're seeing these "disordered" results?

 

[Peter Hill]

I’ve absolutely been noticing this in healthcare too. Urgent care and eye, for example, would show up instead of a medical center. I had at first wondered if it had to do with foot traffic differences due to Covid but if it’s affecting Walmart that doesn’t really make sense...

 

[krystaltaing]

I think this may be one of the original threads to Danny once we identified this issue is owned by search, not GMB:

And the Google Forum thread to report additional use cases: Dealership's service department listing suddenly is showing up for dealership branded search. - Google Search Community

 

[Peter Hill]

Anyone notice some of these issues start to reverse? I'm keeping my fingers crossed as some of the issues have started to correct themselves this week.

 

[CarrieHill]

@Peter Hill I think @JoyHawkins was talking about seeing some of this get resolved. We'd love to see some before/after examples if you have them!

Carrie

 

[JoyHawkins]

A lot of people are saying the issue is fixed but there are still several examples that aren't.