Second location cause 1st location to disappear temporarily

[jasonsseo]

I have a father son business who is trying to expand. The son lives in town B, the father with his established business in town A. Town A is #1 in local and organic for their small town. Town B they don't rank in. The son has a physical address in town B, and although we did not get a post card for some reason, they verified us by phone after the mandatory 14 day waiting period. Out of fear, i did not put the website on town B google local listing. I told them a separate website was prudent, so we did the citations with no url. We were ranking 5th, 1st for a few days, then back to 5th. So i decided to try to put their website on town B google local listing. We got the bump to number 3, and with reviews I think they would have gotten phone calls, but town A DISAPPEARED. The 19 reviews, the google local listing, everything. I took down the website, prayed, and two days later town A was back with reviews and everything, and town B was back down to 5th. Why can I not use one website on two locations? doesn't places like walmart and chipotle do it all the time?

 

[James Watt]

Did that by chance happen on April 1st? There was a bug that affected TONS of businesses that looked about like what you're describing. All of a sudden a profile would disappear off maps, knowledge graph would disappear, and if you did find it on the back end the reviews would be gone.

Having the same website on a second listing won't cause problems, though I personally always have separate landing pages for each location instead of linking all locations to the home page. Of course, I've heard that with schema and all that, Google's smart enough now to not get confused, especially if you only have two locations, so linking both to the home page vs using local landing pages (especially with only 2 locations) is more of a matter of preference.

As a side note, if you're not aware, organic factors are a big part of local ranking. It's not enough to optimize the GMB listing and claim and clean up citations. Backlink building and on-page SEO are a big part of the equation now (40% as of last year based on a major industry survey). Since a lot of the ranking benefit comes from the domain itself, I'd always recommend a business owner uses one website so that the whole brand can benefit from the climbing authority and trust as you get more well known.

If the listing in town A DIDN'T disappear exactly on April 1st and 2nd, and if that happened on a different day, then you might want to post more information here to see if someone sees something you missed that's causing problems. A problem like that wouldn't be caused by sharing a website.

If it was the April 1st bug you got hit with by the way, all you had to do to fix it was move the location pin over a few feet in your GMB profile. Always good to check out the forum here when weird stuff happens, there's always something new in the local world.

 

[jasonsseo]

Wow, yes it was the morning of april 1st, good call. But i had just added the website the day before, so you're saying it wasn't that, it was the bug. should i try it again? it would be catastrophic if i messed with their main listing this time of year.

also the sons house is a service area location which is how they are suppose to be set up in their trade. the fathers original listing was setup as a brick and mortar. i didn't want to mess with that. does it matter that those don't match each other? one brick and mortar, one sab?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Jason,

I agree with James. One site and location landing pages is the way to go and also agree it likely was not a matter of adding the site.

I think I may know what's up.

1st try moving the map marker a hair like James said so we can see if it was that bug or not.

Either way tho u might have a prob.

What industry? What city/towns is A in? What about B?
Same names on listing? Same phone or different ones?

 

[Kristen]

If it was the April 1st bug you got hit with by the way, all you had to do to fix it was move the location pin over a few feet in your GMB profile.

Also, just a heads up. If you do move the location pin, double check that your street number is still in place. I did this one of our clients' listings recently and the street number completely disappeared from the address. I then added it back in and all was good.