Three of our Service Biz Clients Suddenly Have Multiple GBP - Can't Get Merged

[Heidi Powell]

All I am able to find at Google Business Profile Help is the standard way to merge duplicate listings. It has worked for us before but it is no longer working. I've tackled this about 5 times and waited several weeks for nothing to happen. One of the duplicate profiles has no option to flag it as a duplicate. I am convinced that Google is creating these monsters. Something has changed but nobody is talking about it. I say that because one business that's home office based and (verified 10 years ago) suddenly had a 2nd profile appear at their PMB address. We claimed that profile and attempted to merge it without luck. When the mailbox company moved across town, suddenly a 3rd profile appeared with you guessed it, the new PMB number and street address for the postal business. The address in the original profile (that has Google Reviews) has been verified, has always been the home address and always been hidden .

Can someone in the "know" please investigate what's going on with these suddenly duplicate profiles that can't be merged? We just picked up a new client that has the same problem and would like this to be an "easy to do" and not take months to iron out. Not to mention, we want all of these businesses to rank. Any help is very much appreciated.

 

[JS Girard]

Easy: you cannot merge a SAB and a profile with the displayed address. You can only do that with two SABs (with identical or very similar service areas) or two shown addresses.

Be careful when merging SABs: you cannot predict which address will be taken as the one for the merged profile.

 

[JS Girard]

Also the appearance of new google-generated profiles during a major update i not surprising, unfortunately. The Knowledge Graph (to which the GBP profiles belong) has been noted to undergo updates during major updates, which usually explains why we (at our agency anyway) usually observe an uptick in profile mergers and suspensions.

 

[Heidi Powell]

Also the appearance of new google-generated profiles during a major update i not surprising, unfortunately. The Knowledge Graph (to which the GBP profiles belong) has been noted to undergo updates during major updates, which usually explains why we (at our agency anyway) usually observe an uptick in profile mergers and suspensions.

Do you know if these "google-generated profiles" ever just disappear on their own? After doing some really hard work getting some of these profiles reinstated and duplicates removed, it feels like Groundhog Day again. One of them took me about 3 months to clean up. We preach how having more than one profile is a strike against a business yet we can't get rid of it.

So...it sounds like claiming the bogus profiles and changing the addresses to be the same would work, but there is danger in losing the "real" profile. I don't like that idea