Is this technically against Google's guidelines?

[KevinWag]

It appears this SAB (competes with one of my clients) shows on the map in the 3-pack and finder, but the address is just the city and zip.

Is the way to do this checking the box so it doesn't hide your address, but only put in the city/zip for your address? That seems like a halfway lie to have a pin on the map no?

I tried to use the way Joy showed to see what the actual address is and it was a range 301-303 N Court St, which appears to be a picture of a post office or something.

 

[Eric Rohrback]

If they are using a post office, then you can flag their listing to have them removed from maps. If they're correctly using their home address & hiding, then they would be within the guidelines.

 

[JoyHawkins]

They are using a post office address

You can report it as Never Existed via Maps since they aren't at that address.

They list their address about halfway down on their homepage - it's listed as a PO Box.

 

[KevinWag]

Great find Joy!

Do you see a lot of SABs doing what this guy does, where they only fill out part of the address and don't hide their address? So many in this industry do it, and I can't help but think its rewarded by them having the pin on the local pack. (visually helping, not algorithmically)

 

[JoyHawkins]

I don't see this often. It looks like the PO Box was there at some point but got stripped off.

 

[kylewilson]

I'm really surprised this spammer got the pin. In my experience, the GMB address fields are super sensitive to missing/mismatching info and will keep throwing errors at me when I try to submit updated info that it doesn't like.

Perhaps the spammer created this pin when GMB was less regulated than it is now (if you can even call its current state "regulated") and were "grandfathered in" with this spam technique.

 

[KevinWag]

Yeah super frustrating to compete with inspectors that get the pins and still get to hide their address!

 

[JoyHawkins]

They most likely had the address fully there at some point so they would have got the pin no problem since they had the PO Box there.