Duplicate LSA listings, and franchises showing two locations in LSA's

[ssjd2000]

Google verification for LSA's not up to standards. In my area the LSA's are showing duplicate listings, letting franchises have more then one listing in the same area or zip code, and letting businesses ran out of apartments become verified as well as businesses that have a phone and mailing address at the location but not actual staff working. I thought this was exactly what the LSA's were going to prevent. Any one have the same issue or know how get action on this. All my complaints have failed.

 

[Tony Wang]

LSA listings are based on GMB listings, so it's possible a franchise or business with 2 locations could show up in a given area; I've seen it in the past, but haven't specifically looked for that any time recently. Do you have any examples you can show?

I imagine if you used the redressal form to remove a business using a virtual office, for example, it would affect their LSA.

 

[JoyHawkins]

I can safely say from experience that the 2 have no impact on each other. The Google My Business team is seperate from the team that does ads and I have never seen someone getting banned from one impact the other at all.

 

[TomW]

A business isn't required to have a storefront location and a business shouldn't be excluded just because it's home-based, but there is an issue when it comes to additional "locations" for a business in LSA. There's a lot of abuse here and location standards are lower than they are in GMB. Google's verification process is mainly checking to see if the business is "legit" by their standards. Verifying that a business is actually at the address (or addresses) they claim just isn't part of it. It's a big miss on Google's part and several businesses are taking advantage of it.

It is possible to see multiple legit locations for the same business but their service areas are not supposed to overlap. This isn't enforced.

GMB and LSA are separate teams as Joy pointed out. If a business lost its GMB listing due to a redressal form report, the only impact on its LSA listing would be a loss of the GMB sourced reviews. The reviews are the only real connection between the two, but even that doesn't have to be a 1:1 connection. I have seen several instances where reviews from one GMB listing are used to populate reviews on two different LSA listings even though they're different locations.

Accepting abuse reports in LSA isn't something they really seemed to have planned on. Your best bet is to fill out this form, selecting the "other" option and provide details there: Contact Local Services - Local Services Help

The chances of them acting on it, however, I'd say are probably low.