Thanks for the response. I am working on a Lawyer’s listing and his main office listing was flagged. We adjusted the listing so that it once again fit Google’s guidelines, however, the listing is yet to appear in results.

During that process, a listing appeared on Google for our main lawyer, which appears in results for our keywords. We’d like to get the main office listing back up there as well and I am just making sure that having two listings is acceptable.

Thanks for the response.

I am not sure what you are asking. Lawyers are allowed one listing per practice and one per practitioner… this opportunity has even made it into the Guidelines:

You may create one listing per practitioner, and one listing for the office.

I am trying to optimize a page for a lawyer who was dropped and has since to return to results.

Another option is to charge per dupe. I charge an extra 200 per month for dupes because they are so time consuming. Almost every Place page in my niche has 1 – 2 dupes because of Google’s problematic data scraping. So I can’t turn away clients with a dupe because every single one of mine has them.

But I won’t take clients any more that have more than 2. Clients with tons typically have tried to over-optimize and have broken the rules multiple times or they are heavy marketers with all kinds of messy upstream data problems including keywords in name and tracking numbers.

Since listings are claimed by phone number, no other listing for them showed up for me to claim. After doing all the work of building a proper listing, I can’t figure out why my listing will not show up. So I do a search on the business name and what do I find? A total of 16 listings for ONE business, TWO lawyers. A few had different addresses and phone numbers for different offices, but all the same business name. Some listings have the same biz name, phone number and address.

Now I am claiming and deleting…claiming and deleting. Work that should be charged for. And of course, each one I claim only has the option of post card verification. This is taking far too much of my time. Usually my listings show immediately, but not so for this steaming pile of a hot mess.

Talking with my partner who handles all the sales, I suggested that before taking their money, we need to research just exactly what they already have listed and what kind of mess they have made trying to do this themselves. If they have multiple listings, such as what this lawyer has, we should not accept them as clients until they clean it up themselves. My partner agrees and is now our new policy.

He showed me the places page of a potential client. I immediately saw a whole host of problems, one being there are 8 categories on the places page when there should only be 5. This means there is already a problem of merging with another listing. Further search revealed 5 listings for the same business. Not going to waddle through that maze and we opted to not accept this client.

I had just cleaned up 5 duplicate listings for a dental client of mine and had them at the top of the Google Places SERPS. Then the data gets fed backthrough (Mainly from HealthGrades.com) and I’m dealing with the same issue again.

It’s not HealthGrades fault. They actually have the better system. I strongly believe Google Should have the ability to associate sub-listings or professional listings beneath a business listing. But, until then, the best option is to delete the dentists from HealthGrades before cleaning up the listings.

Any additional thoughts?

A Google Places product manager answered this last year: > MB: What is Google’s recommended practice in regards to handling the multiple listings that most professionals and clinics end up with? > Should we endeavor to have one listing for the practice…

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Places/thread?tid=0d1a21e6b224d833&hl=en

Not sure if it shines any new light, just noticed it and thought I’d share.