Dealing With Old or Duplicate Google My Business Listings

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It occurs often when doing the initial research on a client, that there are more than one Google My Business Listings for their business.

Sometimes these duplicate listings are already being ‘managed’. But often there are old listings that have erroneous information associated with them.

Check The Ranking of the Listing First

Before you make any changes, you should check to see the ranking of the Google My Business listing that you want to deal with. You wouldn’t want to delete or -mark as closed- a listing that is ranking well for your keywords.

If you have two listings for the same address, make sure you know which one is the better one before you start with this process.

If you have a listing that has wrong information, but shows the wrong address for example, then please continue reading, as I discuss that situation further in the article. The video linked below might also be helpful as well.

Don’t Just Delete Duplicate Listings!

Depending on the situation, sometimes its better to leave the duplicate listing while just marking it as closed, while other times it is better to just delete the listing completely. This is especially true if you have two listings that have ratings/reviews that you would like to keep.

Verified Listing

If a duplicate listing is verified, then you will be able to make changes to the information before marking it as closed.

(Again, we are always working with the lower ranked version of a duplicate.)

Go ahead and change the wrong information, whether it be the address or phone number for example. After you have made the appropriate changes, you can go ahead and mark the location as closed.

This will result in your GMB manager showing two accounts for the same location.

If you have any ratings associated with that duplicate listing, then you will need to call Google (yes, you can actually call and talk to someone about your GMB account!) and ask them to merge the listings into one.

If you do not have any ratings or reviews for that second account, then you can go ahead and mark it as closed. It will still show up in your manager page, with a red bar saying it is closed.

You can stop the process now if you would like, as you are pretty much done. Having a closed listing in your account makes no difference to your good listing.

Unverified Listing

If the duplicate or old listing is not verified, then you can still deal with fortunately.

I have created this video to walk you through the steps of dealing with wrong or old information on an unverified listing.

As you can see, it is not really a big deal to remove an old listing. One thing I didn’t mention in the video however, is that I did not have any reviews associated with that old duplicate listing. That’s why there was no worries in deleting it.

If you have reviews that you would like to keep, then the process would be similar, except at the end, instead of deleting the listing, you could give Google a call to merge the listings together.

Every GMB Listing Situation Is Different

If your account has old listings or duplicate listings associated with it, please be careful before you start to make changes and I hope that this article has helped you see a few of the options that you can take to deal with those situations.

If you have a messy GMB account, and you are unsure of how best to deal with this, don’t hesitate to leave a comment below.

Yan Gilbert
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