As Google Upgrades Google Maps Business Listings, Conflicts Happen Including Duplicate Listing Issues

Google has been automatically upgrading Google Place listings from the old system to the new Google Places dashboard. With this upgrade, there may be conflicts that prevents the upgrade from completing. The latest conflict is that there are duplicate listing issues and Google needs you to step in, fix the issue and then complete the upgrade process.

Google has recently began sending out notices of the duplicate place listings conflict via email to those impacted by this issue. The email reads:

We’d like to inform you that Google Places no longer accommodates more than one authorized owner per business location. Your account contains one or more listings that have been identified as duplicates of other listings and as a result, some of the information you provide will not be shown to Google users anymore…

Jade Wang from Google posted a detailed how to fix this issue in the Google Business Help forums where she summed up the issues two-fold:

(1) Your account and another account that you don’t control became verified for the same business using the old Places dashboard.

(2) You may have verified the page multiple times using accounts you control.

Each has their own method of resolving, which Google has either emailed the business owner or you can read them below in more detail.

From Jade of Google:

In one scenario, your account and another account that you don’t control became verified for the same business using the old Places dashboard:

Additional unknown verified account(s) from the old Places dashboard: Google Places no longer supports multiple verified business owner accounts for the same business location, so we are letting you know that your account has a listing that’s a duplicate of a listing in another account. By logging into your Google Places for Business dashboard, you can view the duplicate listing, which will show a banner reading, “You cannot update this listing because it has been marked as a duplicate of another.” If you no longer want to manage this listing, you can remove this listing from your dashboard. Alternatively, you can request administrative access from the current owner of the listing using the link to Learn more in your dashboard.

It’s possible that someone else in your organization, or a third party whom you once worked with, verified the business in another account. If you don’t believe anyone else could possibly be active in managing this business information, other than yourself, you can always contact support directly to help restore your account’s access to the listing.

Or, you may have verified the page multiple times using accounts you control:

Multiple known verified accounts from old Places dashboard: You may remove the duplicate listing from the dashboard in the account we emailed, which won’t affect the information on Maps. Then, please simply use the other account to manage the listing.

Verified same business in both Google Places and in Google+, same account: You had a listing that you created on Google Places as well as a local page that you created in Google+, using the same account. You PIN verified the local page in Google+. The system now has identified that the listing you have in Google Places and the page you have in Google+ as duplicates. We have marked the listing from Places as duplicate. If you log in to Google Places, and you should see your local page (from Google+) as well as the duplicate listing, which will show a banner reading, “You cannot update this listing because it has been marked as a duplicate of another.” You can remove this listing from your dashboard, and continue to manage the business using the account with the listing which is connected to Maps.

Verified same business in both Google Places and in Google+, different accounts: You or someone in your organization used different accounts to verify the Google Places listing and the local page in Google+. If this is the case, please use the latter account to manage this page. You should be able to do so via Google+ or Google Places. You can remove the duplicate listing from the account we emailed in Google Places, which won’t affect the information on Maps.

In any of the above 3 scenarios, you can keep the duplicate listing instead of the active one if you really want. First, remove the active listing from that account Then, you should contact our support team, who can help make the duplicate listing active again.

Google Yanks Fake FBI Listing From Google Maps, Puts New Blocks In Place To Stop Further Abuse

In response to a string of cases where fake business/organization listings have been added to Google Maps, Google says it has removed those listings and put in place new hurdles to make it more difficult for this kind of abuse to get through its system.

This latest run of problems came to light about a week ago, when some users discovered they could use Google Map Maker to create fake businesses that would be verified via a phone call. In the beginning, many of the fake listings were harmless.

More recently, the same user took advantage of Map Maker tocreate fake FBI and Secret Service office listings using his own phone number, and even managed to intercept calls to both agencies. Both of those listings were created in close proximity to actual offices, adding to the confusion over which listing was real.

Google has now removed the fake FBI and Secret Service listings, as well as others that have been exposed over the past week.

In addition, contacts at the company tell us that they’ve put new restrictions in place that will make it more difficult for this kind of activity to produce a “live” place listing on Google Maps.

This is hardly the first time users have found a hole in Google’s systems that allowed the creation of fake business listings in Google Maps. More than five years ago, for example, Danny Sullivan wrote about being able to “hijack” Yahoo’s listing and changing the company name to Microsoft.

In this latest case, though, the timing is particularly bad since Google just released its new Google Maps product out of beta.

The hole actually involved Map Maker, Google’s product that allows for crowd-sourced improvements to Google Maps. Hundreds of thousands of edits over the years have helped improve Maps, but it was also still open to the kind of exploits that have been detailed over the past week.

Given the competitive nature of local search, it probably won’t be too long before we find out if Google’s new restrictions succeed in preventing more of this kind of abuse … or if users find other holes they can exploit.

New Google Maps Comes Out Of Preview Today

Roughly last May at Google’s “I/O” developer conference, the company introduced an updated version of its desktop Maps experience. Since that time, it has been in “preview,” allowing users to go back and forth between the “classic” and new versions. Today, it’s coming out of preview and soon will be the default PC Google Maps experience.

Since its introduction, Google has been adding features, tweaking and adjusting the new Maps. Overall, it’s a more visually-compelling product than the old Maps with a wide array of enhanced features. Among them:

• Rich images, photo tours and interior photography
• Smart routing and directions to multiple destinations
• Google Now-like inclusion of hotel, airline and restaurant reservations
• Hotel booking
• Improved public transit data and routing
• Inclusion of ratings/reviews
• Enhanced personalization and social content
• Waze traffic updates

Street View’s Pegman was initially removed and then brought back. One feature of the old Maps that I wish the company would bring back is “search nearby.” That feature has been removed (from everything I can tell). I used it all the time; it was perhaps the thing I used most after the basic maps functionality.

Google Maps is indisputably the leading digital mapping platform and one of the company’s most successful products. Until Android, it was arguably the most successful product after search (save perhaps YouTube). And Maps has been instrumental to Android’s mobile success.

But while no one would dispute Google’s mapping dominance today, the company’s position is somewhat less secure than it was a couple of years ago. Competitors such as Apple and anew push by OpenStreetMaps threaten to chip away at Google’s mapping lead.

That’s good news for consumers because it will mean that Google will continue to invest in and develop Maps. Just bring back “search nearby.”

Postscript: As Matt McGee points out in the comments below you can actually “search nearby” by including the keywords “search near” or similar in the query. So, for example, I can now perform the query: “search for restaurants near the St. Regis hotel in San Francisco” and get results. However this capability isn’t obvious or intuitive (based on past experience with Google Maps).