Warning Email re Google Places Duplicate Listings

[Linda Buquet]

OK so at the risk of sounding like I am saying "Told you so!"

Remember all the times I've said "Wait, don't merge!" Google said it too.

Well lots of folks challenged me, said they did it and everything was fine, accused me of being too conservative or painting things too cautiously. Some were even rude and made it sound like I had no idea what I was talking about. (Some of those are getting these emails now and scratching their heads wondering where the heck that dupe came from!)

It's not that I foresaw this particular problem, it's that I've learned through experience if you jump into new Google stuff right away, sometimes it's half-baked or not well thought out. Then by the time the final iteration happens months later, you end up kind of having to try to unravel a mess - or even sometimes end up having to delete something and start over.

But bottom line, this should all have been much smoother and better explained to avoid all the confusion.

 

[Phil Rozek]

Linda advice FTW!

 

[Matthew Newman]

Re: "Google Places no longer accommodates more than one authorized owner..."

We've recently got one very similar to what you guys are getting, with a major twist being that there's only one listing in our dashboard, and it's marked now as unverified and as a duplicate of another (Again, clicking on the G+ link in the dashboard takes me to a non-local plus page, NOT the places page we manage, and we have not manually upgraded/merged G+ to my knowledge)

Thing is, this listing has been verified in our dashboard since 2011, long before I even started with Google Local (It was just called Local back then, wasn't it?), so I don't know if it was created anew, or if we claimed one that was already claimed by someone else in the old dashboard, or if has nothing to do with those and is just some new bug.

To Google Support, ahoy!

Edit:
Oh, and to answer the question from Chris in the first post, we got this particular one Thursday morning, same exact message as the one posted

 

[Linda Buquet]

Yes Matthew that's a regular dual claimed listing problem instead of the one that's caused by G+ verification.

It often happens when the owner (or you) unknowingly tried to manage listing in a different Google account and sometimes they don't even realize they set up a dupe.
OR most likely a webmaster, staff, spouse or previous SEO did a listing in a separate account at some point.

We've been working with Google to form a statement that covers and explains all the different scenarios. I think it should be published today.

But ya, just call support AFTER you've asked the owner if any of the above scenarios could be the issue. Cuz if you can find the other account and just have them delete from their dash that's the easiest. Otherwise it can drag out and get complicated sometimes.

TIP - I used to tell clients that said, no, no, no to all the scenarios above and SWORE no one else could have created a listing "OK but unfortunately if you can't find the other listing I'm going to have to charge a support fee because it can be extremely time consuming to troubleshoot problems like this."

Guess what? 90% of the time they'd come back 2 hours later and tell me, "you know I checked all my Google accounts and guess what I found?" Or "you made me realize I should double check with my wife and sure enough!"

Hit em in the pocket book and you'll often get to the bottom of the dupe issue.

 

[Linda Buquet]

We've been working with Google to form a statement that covers and explains all the different scenarios. I think it should be published today.

Scratch that. The statement won't be released until next week.

 

[billbean]

Also saw a couple of these this week. Hopefully google will rectify shortly. I'm off to buy some antacid.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hopefully google will rectify shortly. I'm off to buy some antacid.

Well what we are working on won't rectify anything. It will just explain all the reasons this can happen and will explain in a little more detail what to do.

There are 3 primary reasons it can happen and what to do depends on what situation it is, so it's complicated to explain.

 

[Phil Rozek]

Hey guys,

Quick follow-up here.

I had a 2nd client who got the ?you?ve got duplicates? error message. Same situation as before: there were two listings showing in his (new) Google Places dashboard. One of them was the correct local page, the other was a NON-local Google+ page.

This particular client had manually upgraded to G+ last year, before the new dashboard was introduced. He was only upgraded to the new dashboard late last year.

Anyway, same solution as before: if you click on any of the buttons (in your new Google Places dashboard) that says ?Google+ page? and you?re taken to a non-local page, delete that page.

It sounds like there are other situations people are in - maybe getting the dreaded error message for different reasons. But if your situation is anything like the above, that?s what worked for me.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Actually in that case you may not want to delete the G+ page. They may have circles and posts and would not want the G+ page to be nuked.

The problem is just the extra Place page that verifying the G+ page created.

All you need to do is delete the dupe unverified Place page that's in the Places dash.

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Linda

It worked in both cases I dealt with. Not saying it will work in all cases.

There weren?t any posts or circles on those G+ pages. They were just dead weight. For whatever reason, there were no longer any problems once I got rid of them. Even if there were circles or posts, well, I?d say it?s the lesser of two evils, and that ?life?s a beach.?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Thanks Phil,

Just letting others know that Google's advice is simply to delete the extra listing from the Places dash.
They don't even mention deleting the G+ page.

 

[Phil Rozek]

Gotcha. But this is Google, which means they (1) have no idea how to name things, and (2) cannot even stick to the poor nomenclature that they do choose without confusing the bejeezus out of everyone. What I saw and needed to delete were G+ pages, not Places pages, despite whatever Google is telling people.

 

[Linda Buquet]

I'll bring it up to them as they work on trying to figure out how to explain this to everyone.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Oh and by the way, just tried it and your method does not work for me so we must have different scenarios.

I know my page was manually merged, so for me that's the issue that caused the dupe.

The top verified listing, when I hit the G+ Page link (under all listings) goes to the correct merged page.

The 2nd listing (unverified) when I click G+ Page it goes to: https://www.google.com/+/business/ the page you'd go to to set up a new page if you did not have one.

So who knows....

 

[billbean]

Have spent the day sorting this out for multiple clients...not finished, yet. Almost every client has gotten the duplicate owner email/notification.

My head is about to explode, so I don't think I can fully recap everything I've done. Each client situation was somewhat different. I have been deleting unverified listings and pages as has been previously described by both Phil and Linda.

Some of the situations were because we did a manual upgrade of a listing very early. For one client I followed the option to request an ownership transfer to the other account that had claimed ownership...that request came back to the same account. This was one I rectified by deleting the "new" duplicate listing that showed up.

I don't even want to talk about it anymore. My eye is twitching. What a day.

 

[aaronwatters]

Seems like I have similar situations that you guys and gals are addressing here. We have several listings that were manually verified somewhere within the past year and it looks like our Places dash was updated to the new one over the last couple days. We have received several emails from clients with the dreaded dupe listing message.

I've called and spoke with Google twice now and they have just said to remove the red marked unverified dupe from the places dash.

They explained it to me this way:
"Places allowed you to have multiple owners and underneath the new google+ local structure you're only allowed one owner, so Google picks the oldest (first owner) "owner" from the places listing and makes that the owner of the newly generated google+ local. For the other owners that were attached to the places listing, the system duplicates and populates their places dashboard. These are dead non-live listings but are "duplicates" underneath Google's data and are advised to be deleted to prevent any data issues with your listing."

I'm seeing exactly what you guys see in my places dash (multiple listings, some verified and some not) as well as in my plus dashboard when I click on Places I see all the pages we manage and now some are duplicated with here as well.

I really hope the statement that gets released explains what to do as I def am nervous deleting anything.

Updates are much appreciated!

---------- Post Merged at 04:14 PM ---------- Previous Post was at 04:13 PM ----------

My day seems to be going quite similar to billbean

 

[ARKlady ARKtechCo]

I had the same thought Linda, go get 'em gal. ;-)

 

[billbean]

Thanks for chiming in, Aaron. Your post was helpful. Every little bit of info helps with these kinds of things.

 

[aaronwatters]

Not a prob, yeah after days like yesterday it's helpful to hear that people are in the same boat.

I have done anything since my post. Still monitoring this to see what happens.

 

[aaronwatters]

Any updates on this matter?