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Understanding Google My Business & Local Search

Google Local Business Center: Why your impressions might drop to 0%

A question that occasionally crops up in the forums is why would your Local Business Center dashboard all of a sudden show 0 impressions for your business listing in Google Maps?

Nick Thomas, who has worked extensively in the Local Business Center, sent along his observations that identifies the likely cause:

One interesting oddity is when I see a listing with 0 impressions and a few actions. After review of about 300 of these cases now I have determined that the most likely cause of the 0 impressions is a duplicate listing in Google Maps.

Most of the time these duplicate listings are not claimed in GLBC accounts and can be simply placed as ‘removal request duplicate place’. Then after a few weeks the impressions jump into the hundreds if not thousands in the claimed GLBC account. Just thought you would like to know and pass along to others….

statszero

The explanation and example that Nick sent along makes perfect sense. Essentially, for one reason or another (perhaps a slight change in a business title as in the example above), Google’s clustering algo is unable merge a listing received from a trusted provider with the listing in the LBC and gives that other listing preference in the index.

Rather than deleting the extra listing via community edit, I would recommend removing the duplicate record via Google’s suggested method. Nick’s technique will work, but Google’s gprovides more visible information as to the status of the merge.

This problem is more likely to occur the more that your listing varies in critical details from those for your business across the local ecosystem that Google relies on.