My Places listing is MIA

[John C]

My places listing has not been showing at all for the past two weeks. Everything in my dashboard is normal (no red stripe of death), but when I called in to adwords support (I do adwords express too) I had them look at my places account (which shows reviews on my adwords ads and is awsome when it works) and they said it was suspended.

Nothing to indicate suspension in my dashboard. My account was suspended a few months ago and has been back up and fine for over a month until two weeks ago.

I've followed the quality guidelines to a T, im hiding my address in my places account since I have a service area business. A link to my places page from my website just shows a 404 now. (so i removed the link)

This happened at the same time that my organic rankings improved pretty significantly after some onsite SEO i did started to take effect. I thought my places ranking would improve with my organic, but surprise! it just vanished. Coincidence?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi John,

I'm sorry, it sounds like your listing was deleted. If it's the site and phone in your sig, I'm not finding the listing.

Not hiding address is one of the main reasons listings get removed, but if yours was hidden there could have been another problem. Of course you know the problems with locksmiths and Google.

But if you care to share a screen shot of your edit screen we can look to see if there are any other obvious violations before you submit for reconsideration.

 

[John C]

Here are some screen shots of my edit page









---------- Post Merged at 02:10 PM ---------- Previous Post was at 02:07 PM ----------

oh, forgot the first one here:

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi John, I don't see any obvious problems. Did you have other place pages set up or anything iffy about the hidden address location?

If not, then I guess all you can do is follow Jade's instructions and hope they will re-instate the listing.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@John

What is the DBA listed on the major third-party sites? (Particularly ExpressUpdateUSA.com, CitySearch, Yelp, and YP.) That is, do those sites list you as "Auto Lock & Key"?

If there is a mismatch between the name listed on Google and the name listed on the major third-party sites, and if the name listed in Google is "keywordy," you can get pulled.

 

[John C]

DBA is listed correctly everywhere I can find.

One other thing I forgot to mention that now seems really relevant.... I noticed that my address was showing in the places listing for the last few weeks prior to it dissapearing even though I had it set to hidden.

I have ALWAYS had the address in places dashboard set as hidden.

But the address is listed along with NAP pretty much everywhere else, (including my website).

My address was being shown anyway in the places listing.

I'd never really wanted to show my address anywhere, but it seemed like I was at a disadvantage in not doing so. (since I couldn't get citations on express update, etc) and I'd never read anything that said it would penalize me to do so as long as it was officially hidden in places dashboard.

Seems like it was about the same time that my listing on EU went up that the address started showing in Google.....

Should I try to just remove my address from EVERYTHING? I don't really like having it listed anywhere anyway, and it's not doing any good now.

But even if I should do that it seems like there is a bug here with google showing an address it wasn't supposed to.

 

[Linda Buquet]

John there was and I think still is a bug where addresses were showing live even though hidden in the dashboard. So that could have been the issue.

Although I brought the concern up to Google that compliant listings could be deleted by mistake and got confirmation from Google that listings would not be deleted for showing address due to that bug. So either something else was wrong with your listing OR it's just your industry which you know is under intense scrutiny and listings get deleted all the time. Sorry wish I could help.

I would NOT delete address from other listings. Even though your listing was hidden live, Google still needs to match citations to the address in your dash to confirm the business is real and legit.