Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Google Places Experiencing Lost Listings
In Google local when there is big change you can always expect some extra “excitement”. Lost a legitimate listing or getting the “We do not support this location” inappropriately?
As Jason has notes below in his recent email below, several users HAVE contacted me about the issue and Google’s response: We are working hard to fix it soon. Boo on Google for the glitch but kudos to Google for clear & honest communication about the problem!
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Hi Mike B –
I thought you’d find it interesting (perhaps for your blog, which this industry watches with baited breath) on a known Google issue it seems. Here’s the thread.
Basically since June 1 / May 31, our listings just “disappeared.” Both Podesta Baldocchi and Rossi & Rovetti Flowers in San Francisco. We’re sort of fortunate to have somewhat of a good organic presence, though our hit volume is off almost 60%… so it matters to be on Google local. I raised the flag and here’s an email I also received from them:
From: local-help@google.com
Re: [#1039831384] ,!RE: Google Places for Business Help
“Hello,
Thanks for getting in touch with us about your listing not showing.
Unfortunately, your listing may have been dropped due to a technical issue that we cannot yet resolve. We hope to have a resolution soon for this issue, at which point we will be in touch with next steps to help you return your business to Google Maps.
Best,
The Google Team
I bet other people are enjoying this glitch. It appears though to be very connected with the same software change they made when they made it imperative to use Google Plus as the tool to make reports.
Jason B.
Rossi & Rovetti Flowers
415.200.5500
© Copyright 2024 - MIKE BLUMENTHAL, ALL RIGHT RESERVED.
Comments
15 Comments
This is a bit disturbing. I can understand loosing a listing for few days, but we all know how long it takes to get local listing back on Google places. Businesses put effort and time in their listings. I hope they resolve this kind of issue fast before we get a lot of angry zombies protesting online.
This is truly frustrating. My wife’s flower shop is currently experiencing the same issue. It’s actually been quite strange to watch and follow the past several days since the Google+ Local update.
First the listing was gone completely, and marked for “pending review”.
So I re-submitted after doing some edits and it moved to “we do not support that location”.
Next, it must have found some citations and recreated the listing with incorrect image, and no phone number. Similar to what is going on with Rossi and Rovetti flowers. http://i.imgur.com/wbnRu.png Notice that that listing can’t be claimed or edited.
What’s also interesting is that everything “appears” to be normal on most fronts, and the new broken location marker is associated with our G+ page and we’re even still a landmark on the map! http://i.imgur.com/aXdNe.png
We’ve been experiencing issues for months. On again, off again. Thankfully with the exception of some spam reviews from some competitors, everything seemed normal we were “on again” through Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day.
With all of these issues over the past several months, I decided to take the opportunity to move the listing to the appropriate account as it was originally claimed in my own account and not my wife’s years ago. Of course, with no phone number showing up, we’re waiting for the post card and with any luck, our 20+ reviews will come back…
Ugh… I hope we don’t have to start over. [Shakes fist]
tsk, tsk, tsk. Google, google, google. What a long strange trip you put us on.
This issue and thread are very familiar. The business linked to my name above experienced similar circumstances this past April. Some glitch somewhere in google’s backend.
I noticed a couple of things: both Balduccis and Rossi and Rovetti flowers have strong organic rankings. WHEW for them. It saves some of the traffic and leads. Without those strong rankings a crushing loss like that on the Places side (google+local—-hey, Mike, What are we calling it these days??????? :D) could eliminate far more than a 60% drop in traffic!!!!
The above referenced smb in my name also had strong rankings. Its record, btw, suffered a dupe had an instant replacement record created)—but for several weeks the Places side of mapping strength pulled down its visibility.
There is some conversation inside the Places Help Forum thread about the address. How sad for Rossi and Rosetti, to the extent the google team might spend time trying to see if the address is retail and real. IT IS.
I used to lease downtown real estate and those “concourse level” spaces.
UH OH. Those spaces are expensive. You lose 60% google traffic. NOT GOOD. People who work downtowns with those types of buildings and big “concourse” types retail….know about those places and gravitate to them to eat and shop. Those businesses live off that downtown traffic.
So the google glitch is costing them $$$$$$. No two ways about it.
From the commentary side….there is nothing to do but read and comment. hopefully the google fix proceeds and works for the florists in this case.
From our experience…..the recovery started to take effect after about 2 weeks. By 3 weeks the Map/Places/google+local (whatever you want to call it) strength seemed to be about where it was before the “glitch”
Ah….glitch is too benign a word. Its a consistent issue at Google and a more appropriate description, especially considering the financial ramifications is IMHO a ClusterF***.
From our experience, we learned that upon reporting the issue there was nothing we could do but wait. Very frustrating. Very expensive.
Hopefully the recovery is RAPID. If not its more costly.
Very sad circumstances.
It’s officially time for another company to take over the lead in Local Search. We’ve all put up with Google’s sloppiness long enough. Yet another series of confusing product launches with lots of bugs. Bring on Apple, or Yelp, or Facebook. At this point Google deserves the competition. Thanks for all the good times, Google – but at this point sloppiness no longer works for us.
[…] known bug: Google has been losing a number of legitimate listings to the “We do not currently support this location” bug. […]
To Jason & Duane, I see your two situations as very different issues.
ATM Podestal Baldocchi’s G+Local listing is live, but has dropped to Page 2 in Places search. Here’s the G+Local page: https://plus.google.com/115009640646495870236/about?hl=en
Note the address as 555 California Street. That’s the same address used by Rossi & Rovetti. A reviewer also noted the original Podesta Baldocchi as closed and now operated by Rossi & Rovetti.
My guess is the R & R listing was flagged as duplicate since having 2 business listings by the same owner at the same address in the same category likely triggered a merge or a de-listing.
The loss of one listing may be conincidental timing with the move to G+Local. IMO you’ll need to decide which listing you truly want to show in Local.
As for Duane’s issue, I’m stumped as to why the original Local listing disappeared. Your shop has a Google+ page for the business with 100 +’s. But if you recently changed the account owner, it may well have set your listing back and could take quite a while for G to recompile all the data associated with it. Good luck. Hope it re-appears sooner than later.
@Cathy
Thanks. I basically had to create a new listing in the correct account as the info provided here right now is not claimable or associated with the other account. http://goo.gl/maps/2sfR
I know it’s likely adding to the pain of the situation, but in this case, I feel that it could be the right answer as our listing has suffered multiple disappearances, spam and some fairly rigorous activity on the “helpful” and “not helpful” buttons over the last 6 months.
Whichever happens to appear first, the new listing or the old one, I’ll probably run with.
@Mike – FTR Duane is a friend and I watched this winter/spring as his family’s shop got hit with a slew of sock puppet negative review spams. IMO the ‘reviews’ were created by a competitor under muliple accounts and occurred all within days of eachother. The pattern was obvious to humans but easily escaped G’s ‘filters’.
We’re all hoping the integration with G+ – and making real names/real humans responsible for reviews – will put a stop to blatant competitor saboutage that has plagued great local florists like Dragonfly’s.
@Cathy: Noticed that some of our smb’s received their first reviews connected with G+. Obviously staffers were asking customers for them. Got to check w/ those staffers. It appears the customers were either totally new to G+ or new to reviews as they were the first reviews for each of several customers. One attached a pic with it. Others did not.
I think the possible impediment with a review from a g+ acct is only “slightly harder” than before….if one is a dedicated spammer.
One other thing: Abt 1 year ago a person w/ a new google acct and I wrote virtually identical reviews addressed to a multi site smb….with reviews that clearly violated google’s TOS.
Hers were instantly taken down. Mine weren’t. If the review filter attached to new accts is ACTIVE and applied with vigor that might put a crimp on spam attack reviews.
[…] the dreaded “We currently do support the location” message. At the time Google noted that “your listing may have been dropped due to a technical issue that we cannot yet resolve. […]
[…] – Mike Blumenthal – 6:00 am Pending Google’s recovering listings that had been erroneously removed from the Local index, Google advised businesses that they could try to recover the listing […]
[…] & Local),Google Plus – Mike Blumenthal – 8:07 am Earlier this summer, Google removed a large number of residentially located service area businesses (SAB) from the index for not hiding […]
I have run across the same problem. But it was at the start of my plumbing company. I started with google local. Open two months. First month was great. I got 7 great reveiws. Made 21,000. The next month lost all but one reveiw. Week later I was gone. No listing. Tried asking google to fix the problem. Nothing. I bought 3 other propertys right before all was lost. Now I lost the propertys and now I owe 3000 to the bank and the bills keep coming in. I lost everything. Not just what earned with google but everything. Thank you google.
Has anyone got their listing back yet? We’ve been without our listing for 6 months now and I’ve let 1 person go. It’s nice that they admit they have a glitch but taking this long to fix it we don’t call it a glitch. It’s a huge problem.
@Gerry Sort of…
Our listing is back as from what I can tell, a brand new listing, with some of the old reviews. I was actually able to merge a duplicate, but still can’t control it via Google Places even after verification, it’s now going to “we don’t support that location”.
So, sort of?
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