Why would Google remove and then re-add a category to a Business Profile listing?

[NickB-Tampa]

We've been managing a company's GBP listings and for a while now had to re-set the categories multiple times as they seem to take and then be changed just a month or so later.

They are both an AC and heating company, so as an experiment, we decided to raise Heating Contractor to the role of primary category for the Winter. This seems to have been removed but then re-added. Any ideas as to what could be going on here?

 

[Phil Rozek]

@NickB-Tampa, as to why Google's overriding categories, I'd say the most likely suspect is that the categories (or primary category) on the citation sources don't match up. I assume you're not using a service like Yext or Moz Local, which may be syncing with and overriding what's in the GMB dashboard.

For good measure, you'll probably want "Heating" somewhere in the homepage title tag (it's not mentioned there, and in general isn't too prominent on the homepage / GMB landing page).

Not sure why Google's removing and re-adding categories and showing a paper trail of it. It looks like Google is recording the movement of one category from "primary" to secondary and vice versa. The weird contradiction only seems to show up in cases where you've changed the primary category. So if you made "HVAC contractor" (for instance) the new primary category, I bet you'd see "HVAC contractor" struck-through lower down on the list, and you'd still see just one struck-through mention of "Heating contractor."

 

[NickB-Tampa]

@NickB-Tampa, as to why Google's overriding categories, I'd say the most likely suspect is that the categories (or primary category) on the citation sources don't match up. I assume you're not using a service like Yext or Moz Local, which may be syncing with and overriding what's in the GMB dashboard.

For good measure, you'll probably want "Heating" somewhere in the homepage title tag (it's not mentioned there, and in general isn't too prominent on the homepage / GMB landing page).

Not sure why Google's removing and re-adding categories and showing a paper trail of it. It looks like Google is recording the movement of one category from "primary" to secondary and vice versa. The weird contradiction only seems to show up in cases where you've changed the primary category. So if you made "HVAC contractor" (for instance) the new primary category, I bet you'd see "HVAC contractor" struck-through lower down on the list, and you'd still see just one struck-through mention of "Heating contractor."

Thanks for the input, Phil! We'll definitely implement those changes and see if it resolves the issue.