User Edits-What is Going On?

[sarmcl]

So we were doing an audit of one of our client's GMB listings (NOT LOGGED IN) to make sure they were appearing properly on Google Search & Maps. One thing we noticed was user edits are showing up in the knowledge panel of their verified listings. For example, a user suggested the phone number should be something else. I was shocked at this as to why Google would display these edits without first notifying us in the GMB dashboard. We thought it was some weird thing until last night at home I was looking up a business (unrelated to work) and saw the exact same thing. A user edit suggesting a different category. I have attached the photo with with the edit.

Now why the heck would Google display such edits on a verified listing and override what the business has? This is very worrisome to us as an agency because we would have not known about these suggested edits by users as they are NOT in the clients dashboards. The only way we came across them was doing manual searches. We obviously do not have such bandwidth to be checking these manually. We rely on Google notifying us. If Google is going to take a user's suggested edit over our verified info, what the heck is the point of the GMB dashboard?

 

[Steven12]

Wow,
That leaves sabotage wide open for competitors. One local proxy and some evil intent could really hurt a biz listing. Even worse, what can you do about it?

 

[sarmcl]

Wow,
That leaves sabotage wide open for competitors. One local proxy and some evil intent could really hurt a biz listing. Even worse, what can you do about it?

That was our thinking. What would stop a competitor to change the phone number and/or website URL? We were thinking maybe this has something to do with the recent rumors about charging for GMB. Maybe there are going to be different tiers or something(Free means anyone can change stuff vs if you pay us your stuff is on lockdown?)

 

[Steven12]

That's a very interesting point you raise. Lately, I've been studying quite a bit on "Gallery Ads", the "Scroll Pack" and paid GMB's. I believe, the "Scroll Pak" is definitely coming out when Gallery Ads do this fall. They are both identical in structure. I further believe that with 5G rolling out next year they will become video.
Anyways, your comment made me think about the Google certified "$croll Pak."

 

[Mike Vannington]

I manually/visually trasncribed the address from the image, browsed to the Google Maps location via Chrome while logged in to one of my Google accounts and saw no evidence of "suggested edits". It did offer to let me suggest an edit, but that seemed to cross the line in terms of well-intentioned "white hat hacking" so I didn't.

But you might want to reconsider that you were actually logged out. Maybe you had multiple windows open? Point is, I was not able to replicate what you say you saw. Unless I missed it somehow.

 

[sarmcl]

I manually/visually trasncribed the address from the image, browsed to the Google Maps location via Chrome while logged in to one of my Google accounts and saw no evidence of "suggested edits". It did offer to let me suggest an edit, but that seemed to cross the line in terms of well-intentioned "white hat hacking" so I didn't.

But you might want to reconsider that you were actually logged out. Maybe you had multiple windows open? Point is, I was not able to replicate what you say you saw. Unless I missed it somehow.

That example was NOT my clients example. That was the a random business I was looking at and saw that edit. So yes definitely not logged in when viewing that

 

[JoyHawkins]

This has been around for almost a year. See this thread for more details.