Google places is pissing me off

Marketing
1

I’m trying to help a friend with a Google Places listing for their dental practice. It was set up and verified at least a couple of years ago but they recently noticed that it wasn’t ranking well. The office is in a smaller town and there isn’t a ton of competition, so I figured it wouldn’t be very difficult but I’ve become completely frustrated with it. I’ve filled in everything to 100% and have added several pictures, etc. About two weeks ago the listing was finally showing up on the first page and in the first position, which was really exiting. However, now it has fallen back to the second page. As far as I can tell there are 2 potential issues:

  • The business listing that exists in all of the internet directories and their website is the same (I didn’t add them to the directories - the office has been around for a long time) but it includes abbreviations in the address (Ave instead of Avenue and W instead of West). When I enter the abbreviations in the Google Places admin it never applies to the actual listing and only the full words are shown. I’ve waited weeks and it never changes. Does this screw up the citations?
  • There are some duplicate listings that have an individual dentist’s name next to the business name. I’ve reported these as duplicates multiple times over the course of a couple of months but the most Google will do is remove the business name but keep the dentist name. It doesn’t seem like there’s any hope with having these removed and from what I’ve read there is a good chance that even if they are, they may exist in other directories and just get sucked in again at a later time. Is that true or should I keep trying to get them deleted?

I also can’t help but notice that the rankings change seems to coincide with the Google Places/Google Plus for businesses merge. Did anyone else notice a difference in the rankings after the change?

2

This can definitely be a frustrating time with Google Places, particularly with the transfer of them over to Google+. Most local experts are recommending not to make any changes until the transfer is complete unless it is completely necessary. So I would try and hold tight for the next few months and not modify your Google Places info (I know it can be very frustrating to be patient).

You are correct that small differences in address (Ave vs Avenue, etc.) can make it difficult for Google to verify they are the same business and thus count all citations. Also, Google does pull in listings from various sources, so like you suggested removing them in Google may only delete them temporarily and they then get pulled back in later from outside sources.

I would use the time of the Google Places to Google+ transfer to focus on cleaning up your third party sources across the internet and making them as consistent as possible. Try and focus on the 3 main data providers (Axciom, Localeze and Infogroup) that many search engines and local directories pull data from.