Wouldn’t you love to know for every 100 businesses how many Google has conflated information on?

Just saw yet another example of this the other day. A local pizza house’s record having been conflated with an unrelated chain of stores somewhere in Colorado. All their customers are being sent to a website for a business that is multiple states away. No, they don’t deliver!

I don’t see Google putting up any warnings that would lead the uninitiated user to the correct understanding that Maps is far from perfect at this time. They let people bump their own heads and noses to figure this out by themselves…apparently little caring about the slow death of brand/application loyalty this might create.

If Google had a real competitor (which I just don’t think they do), advertising as, “Accurate…not like Google” could really work for all of those people who’ve gotten gum disease and tooth loss. But, while a true competitor remains absent, Google is able to let all of this ride in a customer service-less vacuum and we’re all still using their service. What a situation!

It is very problematic on all fronts. It hurts the smb’s in the listing, it hurts those like your self that help with listing and in the end it hurts Google who seems to have trouble creating a secure reliably functioning product. I am not sure how they will guarantee that your feed of hundreds or thousands of records won’t be overwritten when they can’t guarantee it for the one record entered in the LBC. (Although there are many very good arguments to create a more robust agency level product and support.)

Google’s silence in a time of debacle is also problematic. On one level, I really like Google and I hate seeing them shooting themselves in the foot twice on the same problem. OK there is a problem, thats hard to admit but its understandable. Stuff happens.

On the other hand, the total silence afterwards is not understandable. Google not only needs to be out in front of the problem on a technical level, they need to be out front on a communication level. They should be visiting their own forums to acknowledge the new merge listing poster’s problem and provide, even if perfunctory, updates to the situation.

Instead what we see is dead silence. Thus compounding their apparent mistake with what appears to the outsider as denial or anti-social behavior.

Another great article. As a large local SEO agency we are struggling with this merging factor every day. We receive phone calls from clients who are anygry that their information is not correct or who question what we have done for them because eLocal specific details have been removed from the listing we created. When we try to explain the merging issue, most customers either don’t believe or think we don’t know what we are doing.

Google needs to add a preferred data feed to the LBC for agencies that cannot be overwritten. We currently PIN verify every listing we put up and still Google Maps merges thereby corrupting out data. Have a review process for agencies or make us pay for enhanced listings like Yahoo Local does. Either way we need a solution to the merging problem.