Need Advice On How To Remove A Pesky Duplicate Listing

[Jeffrey]

Hello,

My client is an SAB and at the beginning of the year Google created a duplicate listing for them showing their home address. Since then, I've tried everything I can think of to remove this listing, but nothing has worked. Over the course of 5 months, I've created 4 GBP support tickets, a thread in the GBP Community, tried suggesting a plethora of edits, and verified the duplicate listing so that I could push the "Remove profile content and manager" button, thinking this would delete the listing. Well nothing has worked, and I'm looking for some more advice. The duplicate listing is causing a big headache for my client, because that is the listing that shows up for branded searches instead of their SAB with photos, reviews, etc.

Main: LINK
Duplicate: LINK

Any insight would be appreciated!

 

[keyserholiday]

Have you tried using the redressal form? I attempted to use suggest an edit, and my edits usually get accepted, but they were rejected.

 

[Jeffrey]

Hi Jason, I have not tried the redressal form. I'll submit that right now and hope it gets looked at. If anyone else has any other suggestions, please let me know. It's more the merrier at this point

 

[SaraG]

What I would do in this case - maybe not the "best practice" in general, but you can try to get this profile Suspended / Disabled This way it'll disappear from GMaps.

Make latitude / longitude changes, naming, wrong phone number - this might work. But I'd suggest moving this listing's ownership to a different email so that the suspension doesn't affect the metrics of the other one (although I'm not sure, whether it could, but it's best to err on the side of caution).

 

[Jeffrey]

Hi Sara! So I tried a similar thing yesterday morning, and it did not work out. I figured if I removed the phone number, website, and rebranded it to say Duplicate, Google would no longer show this listing over their more optimized listing. Weirdly enough, Google still decided to show this listing for branded queries, even after waiting 24 hours. I reverted my changes this morning so customers wouldn't just get the Duplicate listing when searching for them.

For some reason Google just seems to love this really weak listing and I don't know why

Also, I filled out the redressal form a week ago and nothing has happened yet :/

 

[SaraG]

Hmmm it's interesting, especially that there's zero reviews on this profile... It's maybe a bit too abstract, but is one of the houses that are visible on the street view somewhere in the photo gallery of the website?

Also, I would still change the naming and delete the www in the duplicated profile. It has an address so it is prone to rank higher than the Service Area listing.

 

[Jeffrey]

Good question! The house in the street view is the owners house where his main SAB listing was verified. I checked their photo gallery on their website and I don't see a photo of his house. Good thought though! I'll make the name change and strip the listing of a website and phone number at the end of day tomorrow, so it'll be like that through the weekend, while they are closed. I have a feeling this won't do anything but worth a shot

 

[SaraG]

I've heard about such a situation before but can't find any information / solution here in the forum. Maybe the address is hidden somewhere on the website? There has to be a page on the Internet where the address is linked with the company in question and the algorithm must have fetched it from there... Or maybe just a bug?

Anyways, good luck!

 

[SaraG]

Ah, okay, I checked it out of curiosity and I can see that the address is actually stated on quite a few pages:

<removed>

I assume this is the reason why it's so difficult to get rid of this profile. Too many websites proving that Just Roofing is located under an address.

 

[Jeffrey]

Hi Sara! So I just did some searching around and I did find a handful of citations with his old home address listed. I could only find one citation with this Beech Ridge address which ended up being his facebook page. Their Yelp has his address hidden even though it doesn't look like it from the search page. I'll have them remove their address from facebook and I'll work on removing his other old citations. Thank you!

 

[JS Girard]

Ah, okay, I checked it out of curiosity and I can see that the address is actually stated on quite a few pages:

I assume this is the reason why it's so difficult to get rid of this profile. Too many websites proving that Just Roofing is located under an address.

More likely it's because the profile is verified. It is harder to get rid of a verified duplicate, incredibly so if (as here) only one is a SAB.

If you originally validated your profile at that address, you can show the address just long enough that you can mark as duplicate. As of late, showing the original address has not resulted in any need to revalidate for us, but our agency deals primarily with GBPs in Quebec, not the US.

 

[Jeffrey]

Hi JS Girard,

Thanks for your input. I have tried for months to get this duplicate removed while it was unclaimed. I only recently claimed it (via email) so I could remove the website, phone number, and change the name in hopes that this would cause it to no longer show up for brand searches. This idea unfortunately did not work. I can easily make the profile unclaimed again, but I don't see this change as being the key to getting it removed.

I'm hesitant in showing the address on the SAB listing since it has good reviews and this change may trigger a suspension.

 

[JS Girard]

Hi JS Girard,

Thanks for your input. I have tried for months to get this duplicate removed while it was unclaimed. I only recently claimed it (via email) so I could remove the website, phone number, and change the name in hopes that this would cause it to no longer show up for brand searches. This idea unfortunately did not work. I can easily make the profile unclaimed again, but I don't see this change as being the key to getting it removed.

I'm hesitant in showing the address on the SAB listing since it has good reviews and this change may trigger a suspension.

Oh, if you DO control it, then it's easy. Instead of putting address on the main, you SAB the dupe with identical NAP+website (substitute service area for address). Once that's properly propagated, it should go away fairly quick after initial suggestions. I've done that multiple times.

But yeah, it's literally impossible to deal with a dupe where only one profile has a shown adress. You either need both as SABs or both with shown addresses.

 

[Jeffrey]

Ohhhh thats a cool suggestion! Let me try that out

 

[Jeffrey]

Update: Google has just marked the main profile as a duplicate of the duplicate profile. Now all the 54 reviews that were on that profile have disappeared.

 

[JS Girard]

Update: Google has just marked the main profile as a duplicate of the duplicate profile. Now all the 54 reviews that were on that profile have disappeared.

It's always been a risk that Google will merge in the wrong direction, but vanishing reviews like this is NOT normal @_@.

 

[Jeffrey]

Okay, so I'm not really sure what my next approach should be.
It appears the profile is still live according to the url at the top of this thread, with all of it's reviews intact. All the owner photos have been removed so it's acting like a profile that got soft suspended. Does anyone know how I should move forward from here?

 

[JS Girard]

Take screenshot and save as many individual review URLs as you can while they're visible. It's still possible the reviews will take more time to merge, but you will need the evidence to attempt restoring the reviews if they do not. I was lucky the last time this happened to me because the client actually wanted the reviews gone. But this is a serious issue if duplicate merging causes reviews to be overwritten!

 

[Jeffrey]

All reviews have been saved. We've saved the author names, review links, screenshots of the reviews, and a screen recording of all the reviews. I guess we'll just wait and see what Google does next

 

[keyserholiday]

What I would do in this case - maybe not the "best practice" in general, but you can try to get this profile Suspended / Disabled This way it'll disappear from GMaps.

Make latitude / longitude changes, naming, wrong phone number - this might work. But I'd suggest moving this listing's ownership to a different email so that the suspension doesn't affect the metrics of the other one (although I'm not sure, whether it could, but it's best to err on the side of caution).

This is an unclaimed business profile. He can't log in and edit it. The edits you suggested could get his email address into trouble with Google and lead to an account-level suspension.