What to do with business with different locations?

[Gsmithmike]

I am dealing with this company which has multiple locations all around, as a matter of fact they hired someone long time ago to do SEO and what he did was to create different addresses and "Advertise" on that are with creating different citations. The business itself have 5 locations but honestly i cam across 10 more locations which does not exist. While i can not remove all the locations what is the best choice?
- Shall i correct the business name, create a page for that area, as they do offer service there

- Shall i keep removing the addresses and clean them up

Honestly what happens when a business pretends to have more than the locations physically exists?

Anybody had any situation like this? I know for sure star bucks has multiple locations but services that you go out and service people, what about them, is this against the guidelines and what should i do eventually?

 

[mborgelt]

IF any of the fake locations are in the same city as a real location, I would definitely clean them. I would also clean the fake addresses to prevent users from going to a location that doesn't exist, and to prevent directories from picking up the wrong information about the business. To make life easy, you can replace the false info where possible with info of the locations that do exist if the real location is not on that directory. It sounds like their last SEO created a big mess for them.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Michael is right.

Additionally Google will often suspend the entire account if they find a fake G+ Local listing or other evidence of blatant spam. So then all the locations even the ones that are valid can be penalized.

 

[Gsmithmike]

Thanks for the info but the problem is

- if i replace the fake addresses with actual business addresses then i will have duplicate,

- They do not have G accounts so it is only inside the directories not on the G+

 

[Linda Buquet]

If it's only on other directories, not as big of a concern.

But FYI Google will likely find them and auto create listings, may have already on some of them.

 

[warrenpd]

It really depends on what you want to do here. The correct thing to do would be to mark them as closed. If you do that you will most likely see some negative movement in the local pack with your real locations.

If you just leave them alone you face the possibility of Google finding out they are fake and then penalizing all your listings.

I guess if it were me I would mark them as closed but not do it all at the same time that way it would lessen any hits you would take to the real listings.