GMB Automatically Swapping Location Information

[lkimball]

Has anybody had an issue with two Google My Business listings swapping information? We have a client that has three dental offices, two of which are less than a mile from each other. The business names are Fortson Dentistry - Lathrup Village South and Fortson Dentistry - Lathrup Village North. Within the last month, Google is swapping nearly all the information between the two locations including the business name, address, phone number, even the business description. We change the information back to be correct, then the information is changed to be incorrect again a day or two later. As you can imagine it is negatively affecting rankings.

When we reached out to GMB support, they told us it was users updating the listings. We have removed all users from the account except ourselves to ensure it wasn't an issue of someone having access to the account that shouldn't.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Stefan Somborac]

Hi @lkimball,

It looks to me like your locations page for Lathrup South Family Dentistry Lathrup South | Fortson Dentistry has an embedded map for the Lathrup North location and vice versa.

I suspect that mix-up is causing the algorithm to confuse the two GMB listings.

 

[lkimball]

Hi @lkimball,

It looks to me like your locations page for Lathrup South Family Dentistry Lathrup South | Fortson Dentistry has an embedded map for the Lathrup North location and vice versa.

I suspect that mix-up is causing the algorithm to confuse the two GMB listings.

Hi Stefan,

Thanks for the feedback. The embedded maps are showing the wrong information because the GMB listings have been switched again. We have edited the GMB listings to be correct over 20 times now so we decided to leave them until we hear back from Google, otherwise, they will tell us everything is fine again.

If you have any other thoughts, please let me know! I appreciate you taking a look.

 

[Amanda Putney]

Hi @lkimball

Google is pulling data from a source it trusts more than the owner/manager of the listing for this information. It is worth doing a health check on your citations to see if they are contributing to the problem.

For example, Yelp contains duplicates locations. Do you have access to their Yelp listing to make corrections and claim duplicates?

 

[lkimball]

Hi @lkimball

Google is pulling data from a source it trusts more than the owner/manager of the listing for this information. It is worth doing a health check on your citations to see if they are contributing to the problem.

For example, Yelp contains duplicates locations. Do you have access to their Yelp listing to make corrections and claim duplicates?

Thanks for finding this duplicate, Amanda. We have been doing a variety of searches to find any incorrect information and have not come across any as of yet. We will take care of this duplicate and look for others.

 

[FriarTuck00]

I had a similar situation where Google kept swapping out a phone number for a plumber client of mine. As @Amanda Putney said, there's a source that Google trusts more than the verified owner of the page. In our case, there was an old Moz Local subscription that had the wrong phone number. Once that was changed to the correct number, everything was fine.

As far as the comment about "users updating the listings", that could likely be Google Maps users - not users as far as GMB listing management goes.

 

[JoyHawkins]

I would check for a 3rd party app that uses the GMB API (like the example from Friar). This is probably the #1 thing I see responsible for unwanted changes. You can see what apps currently have access to change your account here: Sign in - Google Accounts. Look for things listed under the third-party apps section that say they have access to manage business listings. In my presentation at State of Search in 2017, I shared an example of a business who went from position 1 to position 31 overnight because he connected his GMB listing to Yext and didn’t realize he entered a different primary category into the Yext data (so it updated his GMB listing).

 

[FriarTuck00]

I would check for a 3rd party app that uses the GMB API (like the example from Friar). This is probably the #1 thing I see responsible for unwanted changes. You can see what apps currently have access to change your account here: Sign in - Google Accounts. Look for things listed under the third-party apps section that say they have access to manage business listings. In my presentation at State of Search in 2017, I shared an example of a business who went from position 1 to position 31 overnight because he connected his GMB listing to Yext and didn’t realize he entered a different primary category into the Yext data (so it updated his GMB listing).

@JoyHawkins This is a great tip! Would you mind if i used this screenshot in a blog post about this for our agency? I'd give you credit, of course.

 

[JoyHawkins]

For sure. We're usually okay with people linking to us