I decided to write this article in response to a recent article that was published over at CBSDFW. The article was one of many stories about how spammers update legitimate information on Google as a way to send more leads somewhere else. This might shock some readers, but it was old news to me since spam of this nature on Google Maps has been a problem for almost a decade.
What sparked my interest in this article was Google’s response. Google stated:
Merchants who manage their business listing info through Google My Business (which is free to use), are notified via email when edits are suggested. Spammers and others with negative intent are a problem for consumers, businesses, and technology companies that provide local business information. We use automated systems to detect for spam and fraud, but we tend not to share details behind our processes so as not to tip off spammers or others with bad intent.
Someone might read that and feel safe, believing that they have nothing to worry about. However, some of us who have been in this space for a long time know that there are several incorrect and misleading statements in that paragraph. I’m going to point them out below.
"Merchants are notified by email"
- Google just started notifying users by email last month. Their statement makes it sound like this has been going on for ages. Before September 2017, there were no emails going to people about edits made to their listings.
- Not everyone gets an email about edits that have been made. To test this, I had several people submit an update to a listing I own to change the phone number. When the edit went live, the Google account that was the primary owner on the listing got an email; the Google account that was a manager on the listing did not.
Similarly, I am a manager on over 50 listings and 7 of them currently show as having updates in the Google My Business dashboard. I haven’t received a single email since they launched this feature a month ago.
"Notified [...] when edits are suggested"
Merchants are not notified when edits are "suggested." Any time I've ever heard of an email notification in the last month, it went out after the edit was already live.
Here's a recent case on the Google My Business forum. This business owner got an email when his name was updated because the edit was already live. He currently has a pending edit on his listing to change the hours of operation. Clearly this guy is on top of things, so why hasn’t he denied it? Because he wouldn’t even know about it since it’s pending.
The edit isn’t live yet, so he’s not receiving a notification — either by email or inside the Google My Business dashboard.Edits show up in the Google My Business dashboard as "Updates from Google." Many people think that if they don’t "accept" these edits in the Google My Business dashboard, the edits won’t go live. The reality is that by "accepting" them, you’re just confirming something that’s already live on Google. If you "don’t accept," you actually need to edit the listing to revert it back (there is no "deny" button).
Here's another current example of a listing I manage inside Google My Business. The dashboard doesn’t show any updates to the website field, yet there's a pending edit that I can see on the Google Maps app. A user has suggested that the proper website is a different page on the website than what I currently have. The only way to see all types of pending edits is via Check the Facts on Google Maps. No business owner I've ever spoken to has any clue what this is, so I think it’s safe to say they wouldn’t be checking there.
Here's how I would edit that original response from Google to make it more factually correct:
Merchants who manage their business listing info through Google My Business (which is free to use) are notified when edits made by others are published on Google. Sometimes they are notified by email and the updates are also shown inside the Google My Business dashboard. Google allows users (other than the business owner) to make edits to listings on Google, but the edits are reviewed by either automated systems or, in some cases, actual human beings. Although the system isn’t perfect, Google is continually making efforts to keep the map free from spam and malicious editing.
Do you manage listings that have been edited by competitors? What's your experience been? Share your story in the comments below!
Joy... Since a year ago, one of my client competitors created one duplicate listings in Delhi, India. They verified duplicate listing (some changes in address) by the Google postal card process. The duplicate business was running very well, and then they created one more duplicate business (applied same verification method). Now they have 4 duplicate verified listing, As a local Guide, I reported these listings by click - suggest an edit > duplicate business. But it didn't work (May be because these all are verified). Regarding this, last month I tweet to the GMB team (include you too) with #StopCrapOnTheMap. After a few days, they replied on DM - "Please wait for the changes to take place." and before 2 weeks they replied again "allow some more time". The case is still not resolved and my client business effecting too. According to me, This case clearly indicates that suggest an edit is not working on the case of verified duplicate lists and the postal card verification method seems like doubtful too.
Joy, what is your opinion about suggesting an edit option for "verified" duplicate GMB listings?
You raised lots of good points here. Yes, most of our edits are reviewed by an automated system. But Google needs to do lots of work for spam free listings.
Thanks.
If you've already reached out on Twitter I would follow up there first. The other option is that you can post over on the Google My Business forum. The response times have been bad lately due to the volume increasing. I see a lot more reports of spam than I used to.
If you report them on Maps, don't use the duplicate option. This is like vacant hole that just goes nowhere (in my experience). Instead I would do Permanently Closed > Never Existed if the locations don't, in fact, exist. I've found that to have success with reporting spam to GMB you have to be very detailed in your report. So instead of just telling them that there are 4 listings for the same company, show them how you concluded that (ex: same website) and show them how you are certain the other locations don't exist (street view, photos you took of the location etc).
We are facing similar problem, our GMB page is verified by a spammer, all the information like name, category, website etc are same but he entered mobile no of a lady, we are in contact with her but not able to change mobile no, when we go for verification page get suspended. We are running our business from 2009 and list it on GMB ON 2012. till we are not able to verify. Many time we got verification code but after entering page get suspended.
Now we have two problem if anyone help us, we are very thankful
1.Other verified our GMB listing with spam data.
2. We are facing problem of verification suspension.
Page link.
https://www.google.co.in/search?q=krishna+packers+...
Contact No: 9716063286, FARIDABAD
Thank you for making this type of articles that almost nobody talks about on the Internet.
A competitor of mine in google maps modified me the main category of my business, which is precisely the one that we developed for more than 30 years (labour consultancy) and I had to turn to Google so that I could place that professional category again. Thank goodness my website is expressly legal and we were quickly put back in that category.
Haven't seen this kind of changes but sometimes I have faced late and confusing replies from GMB team. Wondering why they are not much concern about the privacy. .
Thank Joy! Would be nice if we could have a "Accept no public updates" that is set off by default, but atleast allows active managers to protect their listings.
I agree with you, Brendon. For some reason I thought that is the owner had claimed their listing that others couldn't change it. That is how it SHOULD work.
It's kinda sad to see such articles, but it's even sadder going down to the comment section and reading a lot of people having the same struggle.
Just to make a positive note: we can hope that Google will listen and eventually get these kind of problems with GMB solved, or better managed.
Hi Joy,
What are your views on negative reviews posted by competitors for a business? There should be some sound mechanism to proof-read such edits and updates. I have reached to GMB people for edits and change in address, but still the businesses are marked in-correct on Google maps. It's been almost n year and they respond in similar manner to "wait for some more time".
Hi Amit, I can share you frustration with the time that it takes Google to resolve issues. Just prior to me taking over a local taxi company, an update was made to their telephone number that made it a premium rate number at £1.20 per minute. Non of the management staff where aware of this and we later found out that it was done by their own telephone company? After reporting it, it did take almost a year to rectify this!
Negative reviews are tough because the majority of the time you can't prove the person's identity because they don't use their real name. If, in your case, they did use their real name, you might be able to get it removed if you can point to their website or LinkedIn profile showing that person works for your competitior.
Hello Joy,
This was very useful to me, you forget how some people/ competitors can be!
Great article Joy!
And don't forget about people suggesting to add inappropriate photos to a business listing, adding nonsense "questions & answers" on the new feature. That lack of moderation from Google is disapointing.
Thanks for the insight. Anyone know a software to keep track of the changes?
I track mine with BrightLocal.
Thanks for the great post. Whilst i have come across this on occasion, it is obviously larger problem than I assumed. So much for ethical seo.
I have read about this happening before. The Serbian Crown Restaurant in Washington DC went out of business and the owner sued Google over a false listing on Google Maps in 2014. The Maps entry said the restaurant was closed during the weekends (much like your DUI Lawyer example). They suffered a 75% loss of business, which they attributed to the listing.
Ultimately the case was dismissed. Google successfully argued that the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which grants online services like Google immunity from liability for third-party content hosted on their sites, barred the suit. It also appears that the Serbian Crown didn't claim their listing, which made monitoring and amending it even more difficult.
My take away is to claim your listing and be vigilant in protecting it. One way would be to utilize automated change detection software.
Web crawls are fairly easy to automate and the data can be compared to a master template. With this technology, the vigilant and tech savvy listing owner (or their account manager) could build / use an application that would actively monitor the listings and detect changes. Google notifications are better than no notifications but I would sleep better knowing that my crawler is checking for data validity everyday.
Thanks for highlighting this issue, Joy. I really hope that Google My Business can sort this out, as it really feels like a vulnerability that they've almost forgotten, washed their hands of responsibility for, or at least been naive about. Surely they can't expect to be open source and not have to have a rigorous monitoring process in their somewhere? Some users will simply spam or disrupt because they can, or because it's Google, or because they want to damage a brand.
If GMB could be consistent with their emailing pattern then that would be an improvement at least, and help avoid situations like the one Enrique has mentioned here.
This is very perturbing. Why would you think Google is messing this up so terribly, it doesn´t look like rocket science (but then again I am no rocket scientist). GMB could be a great tool (although I got pretty lost, and had quite some headaches, over all the major changes they made to it over the years – since google places, maps, local, plus local etc)
I think Google will never stop accepting public edits because business owners 1. Often fail to keep their listing up-to-date and 2. Have the motive to spam and break Google's guidelines.
I see lots of cases where the business owner is the one that is wrong and adds keywords to their name to help ranking or creates multiple listings using employees' addresses.
I think Google could solve some of these issues by bringing back public edit history on a listing. This used to exist but was one of the things that died when they killed off MapMaker.
I have had a competitor suggest an edit that my business was closed and it took me three weeks to get my listing back up as shop open.
Also had someone claim my listing and direct traffic to another competitors address and website as they added this to my listing .
Yep a competitor was operating my GMB
Yikes. If you claim the listing in GMB you can immediately mark it as open through the dashboard. If you didn't have ownership at the time this happened, I can see how it would take a few weeks to resolve, unfortunately.
One of my accounts had three suggested changes all within about 15 minutes of each other (not suspicious at all). First suggested name changed to 'No Name', second suggested hours changed to 'No Hours', and third suggested phone number changed to 'No Phone Number'. I found the third guy on Facebook and he just happened to work for the client's previous SEO company. The one that sent them an email once a month with a fill in the blank form blog post and fill in the blank facebook posts. I swear that is ALL they did for the client. Glad I happened to spot those suggested changes before they went live.
Wow. That's nuts. Good news is that edits like that shouldn't auto-publish since they don't appear natural whatsoever.
hi
Someone, maybe Google added resturant infront of my resturant. interestingly it is in italy so its Ristorante and when i search on english i get restaurant in search results. I did not accept this change and it is live! google bot?
EEEEESH! - one really needs to be on top of GMB data mods... Thanks for sharing Joy :-)
Thank you for the information. I will be monitoring my accounts of Google My Business
At mKonnekt we manage restaurant listings and this has become a problem because companies like Slice etc create their own online ordering platforms and have the ability to change order ahead links. So everytime we have to stay on top of this listing because companies like Slice, Kydia create duplicate entries and we have to go back and keep editing them. This is too painful for us.
Great article Joy - thank you for sharing as the struggle is real when we have to manage client GMB's but are not the owners and notification isn't given. Such an awesome point and exposure that Google must remedy in my humble opinion. I use Moz Local and it'd be interesting to see if they figured out a way to alert subscribers when GMB activity is updated in the listing or on maps - whether that's via an API script "alert" or what idk. We have had some clients where it was clear they were the targets of malicious updates and recommended changes - what I'd like to know is whether or not Google auto-approves recommended edits based on a threshold as it seems in one of my clients cases they auto-updated his GMB info with a competitor URL! We attempted to duplicate it using 6 requests to change the phone number and it didn't succeed we then tried it again like a month later at 9 requests (different gmail accounts and I believe a yahoo account even) and it did auto-approve the update we also rather than submitting the suggested edits in one day spread it out over a week. So I'm curious if Google has a systematic flaw or algorithm that monitors the frequency, IP, and edit type and if the creteria is met it will auto-approve. Sad that people would do this and shameful but it's why we as digital marketers must act ethically and safe guard our GMB's as much as possible. Hopefully Google will reassess their approach to this as well. Thanks again and many blessings!
Good points you have!
I live in a typical vacation area so people takes lots of photos here and quite a few of them gets connected to my business. I write google and let them know that the new connected pictures to my business map has nothing to do with my business! This doesn't seem to help so I just made peace with it..... for now ;o)
If they are not pictures of your business you should be able to get Google My Business to remove them if you contact them on Twitter or Facebook.
Thanks for covering this, Joy. Even more frustrating is when editing listings is so buggy I can't correct the changes made by others. (E.G. trying to remove the mention of Checks altogether but for some reason it wouldn't save - https://www.screencast.com/t/CrClOkQWp)
This is frightening. How do you combat this? Do you make everyone a "manager" of each listing to stay on top of changes?
I would regularly check the Google My Business dashboard and look into software that notifies you of changes to your listing.
My GMB account was suspended because my business partner used the Yext platform that was connected to GMB to update the name of our business for xxx LLC to xxx Atlanta Local SEO. Nice keyword stuffing there, don't you think? He claimed he didn't know that what he was doing was against google policies. I began investigating the google guidelines (I was supposed to be the accounting guru, but learned a lot about SEO) and discovered that this wasn't the only policy that was being broken. We also had a virtual office with Regus. I became concerned about our client that we'd just launched with 10, yes 10 virtual locations with Regus. The end result. Business Partner ignored my request to fix the website so that I could request to have the GMB reinstated (that was the 3rd policy of google's that was broken). but it never happened. 3 months later the business partners shut me out of the business leaving me with no income. Yet, they now have a 2nd location on google maps with the only legitimate address of the client with the 10 virtual locations.
Thanls Joy Hawkins for sharing this article. I was thinking like if we do not accept the edit suggetions, The GMB will be remians the same, But now i will surely keep eye on my buysiness page. Very informative article.
We get emails from Google, daily, telling us changes have been made, but that email does not give you a link to enable you to do anything about the change.
And the reason we get a daily notification, because some idiot is wasting his time changing our clients listing daily.
Thank you very much for the information, Joy. The truth is that it is a little annoying that some competitor can modify some of the data of my clients.
I make sure to keep up with clients my business listing on a regular basis. At least once or twice a week I check to make sure things are rolling good!
Yesterday I almost found out by accident that somebody had asked us a question a couple of weeks ago using GMB. Didn't know that that was possible... Neither was I ever notified about that by mail...
Yeah Q&A isn't integrated with GMB yet so the only way to get notified about it is through the Google Maps app. It's really annoying because they are push notifications and if you accidentally clear it, the notification disappears forever and there is no way to tell what listing it was for. More on that topic here: https://searchengineland.com/6-things-need-know-go...
I appreciate the heads up on this. Something we will have to monitor closely.
Hi,Joy
Thank you so much for sharing for sharing this informative tips.
This is very useful for me .