Google Places: "this place is permanently closed" what next?

[JSOC]

All,

I'm working on a duplicate Google places listing issue. One of the listings is accurate, verified and has been reviewed by quite a few customers. However, we have a problem with an old address that still shows up in Google maps and seems to be the cause of poor performance for the accurate listing.  The old address listing was deleted but may not have been removed using best practices based on what I've been able to read here at SEO Moz.

The old address listing has been flagged by Google with a notation: “this place is permanently closed.” My question is what happens next? Do listings that have been flagged as permanently closed eventually drop out of the search results Or do I need to take additional action?

It appears that once a listing has been flagged as permanently close you can no longer report a problem so that route seems to be unavailable.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi John,

Thanks for coming to Q&A to ask your question. In my personal experience, I have seen listings marked as 'personally closed' eventually drop out of the index if no further changes are made to them, but as to how long this takes, I can't give you a firm answer. Mike Blumenthal's in depth post on this topic comes to the same conclusion regarding unknown length of time, and you might like to read it:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2011/09/28/google-places-what-does-the-new-business-permanently-closed-process-look-like/

The alternate route to sitting around waiting to see when this would happen would be to reclaim the business back into the client's account and then follow the steps for reporting the problem of the business having moved and having another, authoritative Place Page.

At the beginning of 2011, I wrote a post about experimenting with reporting a closed business:

http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=926

4 weeks later I heard from Google and wrote about their marking the business as closed and emailing me

http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=958

At that point, I could still find the flagged-as-closed business in the index. Your question here prompted me to go and see if this was still the case. I discovered that the shop I reported as closed now appears to have disappeared from the organic and Places results, a year later. Wish I could tell you exactly when this happened, but I didn't keep following up on this. At any rate, it did happen eventually.

Hope this helps, John!

Miriam

[JSOC]

Thanks for the great answer Miriam!

[MiriamEllis]

You are very welcome, John!