Fake Map Listings Auto-Created by Citation Service?

[maidenshin]

Hi all,

My name is Tom Huang and I work at Stanford Health Care in California. I'm new to this forum and a first-time poster here, so wanted to first say hi!

We have noticed on Google Maps that fake/nonexistent listings keep showing up at a location near our hospital with various doctors' names who're not one of our doctors. The listings all have the same naming convention "Stanford Hospital & Clinic: XYZ MD", use our real phone number, our real address, our real website, but the location of the listing is always placed at an intersection near where our hospital is, but not accurate location.

An example of a fake listing is here: Google Maps

I've also attached a screenshot for reference.



I have been using "Suggest Edit" > "Do not Exist" and been able to successfully remove these listings, but new listings keep coming back.

Has anyone here seen anything similar?

Given that it doesn't actually drive traffic to other businesses/hospitals, and it always show up at the same location using the same picture, I was wondering whether these are auto-generated by an algorithm used by some other citation/listing service. However, I'm not sure what's the best way to investigate further.

Any suggestions/thoughts?

Thanks very much!

Tom

 

[JoyHawkins]

Hey @maidenshin it looks like this particular listing is a practitioner listing. Doctors are allowed their own listings in addition to the listing for the hospital. Is there a William Howell that works at the hospital?

 

[maidenshin]

Hi @JoyHawkins - Thanks for your reply. We do have both practitioner listings and clinic/hospital listings in our GMB account, but William Howell is not one of our doctors. When I googled doctor names from these listings (not our doctor in all cases), what I found is there will be a doctor/doctors with the same/similar name located in a completely different city (ex: on the east coast of US) from Palo Alto and practicing at a different hospital hundreds/thousands of miles away from Stanford. And the URL and phone number are always ours - so my assumption was they are not spam listings created by a competitor for business reasons --> hence the thinking of listing service auto-creating these based on incorrect information they have.

Have you seen anything similar? From other industries?

 

[JoyHawkins]

I'd suggest creating a thread over at the Google My Business forum and I can escalate it and see if Google will give me some insight into what's causing them.

List several examples if you can and DM me the link to the thread once you create it.

 

[maidenshin]

Thanks very much, @JoyHawkins. I'll DM you right now.