Dashboard Listings For Multiple Customers

[grantbrott]

I have just taken over several dozen Google Places listings for a marketing company. They have a Google Places account with about a dozen clients listed through it and want to start listing them under individual accounts. Does anyone have any references to best practice for moving a places listing from a consolidated account like that to a single customer account or would the best bet be to leave them as is and just do the new ones under single customers accounts which is what I recommended for the time being but I have not been able to locate anything for this type of situation.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Excellent question. It's always best to have listings in there own individual accounts. Unfortunately, re-claiming listings in a new account can have a few potential negative side effects:

• Listing may lose ranking
• May need time to be re-indexed
• Possibility of losing reviews

With that said, I have had to move clients into new accounts several times before and I have rarely experienced any of these side effects.

I would say some best practices would be to:

• Claim into an account with the company domain
• Wait until the listing in the new account is active and the dashboard is synced up before removing the listing from the older account

 

[Linda Buquet]

Colan advised exactly what I would have said - only better!

But the other thing I would warn you about, because it sounds like you are also considering just leaving the existing ones in that joint account and then new clients do new account...

Just realize all it takes is one or 2 violations on any of those accounts and Google will SUSPEND the entire account. That means even the clean innocent listings get penalized. So if by chance you leave them in that acct you need to do a VERY through audit of the listings to ensure no violations.

The other extra PREVENTATIVE step I'd add to Colan's very good list is this.

Since you inherited this from another SEO you don't know how good they were at playing by the rules. I would still scan for just the 2 major violations - KW or city stuffing in title OR Geo stuffing in cats.

If any listings have those violations I'd add a step. Backspace title one char at a time to get rid of violations there. (Don?t use delete key.) Then delete the bad cats. Wait 2 weeks. THEN set up new. THEN delete old from your account.

The reason is when you set up new listing then delete old from account occasionally I've seen the listings merge and those old violations can kinda stay stuck and merged with your new clean listing. So I like to strip, wait for changes to clear, then delete.

 

[grantbrott]

Hi Linda, I wanted to clarify with you on

But the other thing I would warn you about, because it sounds like you are also considering just leaving the existing ones in that joint account and then new clients do new account...​

I only plan to leave the existing in the consolidated account until the new listing's verification pin shows up then I plan to delete it from that account. Is that what your referring to by leaving the existing one? Is there still a chance of getting a penalty if I have a listing in the old account and a pending one in the new account?

 

[Linda Buquet]

OK sounds like you are planning to move them. Good.

I keyed off this part of comment "would the best bet be to leave them as is and just do the new ones under single customers accounts which is what I recommended for the time being"

So thought you were considering leaving them all in one account.