DUDE, Where’s my Map?!?

September 23rd, 2010 by Search Influence Alumni

I had a team member send out a red flag email about a client’s Maps listing 2 hours ago.  We had successfully squashed a listing created by a competitor who had been spamming with our guy’s business name, but today, it suddenly appeared again, and our guy’s real listing completely disappeared!

I know Google lost an entire city in Florida, which has now been found, but as we dig into it today, this looks like the entire East coast data is in an upheaval.

My concerned team member, Paula Keller, expresses frustration, “I can’t even find the listing. I saw it when I first searched for the phone number, clicked more info, and it said “We currently do not support the location” I logged in and clicked to view the listing and it says “We currently do not support the location” for both the practice’s listing and Dr. Parker’s listing.”

When we search by phone number, we get the totally wrong listing we thought we had squashed:

We thought we had squashed this listing months ago starting in April, and we further confirmed it was gone in May and June.  Haunted by listings of the past!

We logged into the account and clicked on “See your listing on Google Maps” ….

see your listing on google maps

And this is what we got ….

we do not support the location

Google must be up to something or rolling out some changes, and I have another team member check in various Place Page accounts to see if we notice a pattern in geography. Melanie Aleman reports in:

“I logged into the Google Places account for the following clients to check up what’s up, this is what i found:

  • Dr. A A – no problem
  • C C Doctors – “We currently do not support the location” when I tried viewing either listing on Google Maps
  • Dr. B B – “We currently do not support the location” when I tried viewing either listing on Google Maps
  • Dr M M – “We currently do not support the location” when I tried viewing either listing on Google Maps
  • R R – no problems”

One of Melanie’s screen shots:

Google listing not supported

So far it appears this is on the Eastern time zone.  I see a surgeon’s Place Page listed in maps, but when I click on a Place Page link in Maps (not through the account), I get this:

breast augmentation columbus ohio

Oop!  Maybe not just on the East coast!  A doctor in the southern US has a claimed listing, and right now it’s not even showing as owner verified!  And I KNOW it’s verified ….

I had yet another team member, Elizabeth Selasky, check out some client on the West coast to see how far this chaos is reaching.  She reported back that the West coast appears to be unscathed.

We also had some other weirdness happen over the last week.  We had 3 clients report back in that Google had called their business, and a real live person at Google wanted to verify their business address because a user had reported a problem with his address. The first occurrence of a real live Google representative calling a business was totally unexpected.  The 2nd and 3rd was just more confirmation that this must be legit Google.  Is Google paying attention to when users are reporting a problem with listing data?

Something is definitely going on with the Google Place Page product today.  Maybe it’s a database clean up on a massive scale.  We’re not sure, but we’re watching it closely.