Citations have dissapeared from places listing

[nickydunin]

This site citations have dissapeared from the 'more about this place' and looks to have effected the maps ranking by dropping the listing a few places:

http://maps.google.com.au/maps/place?hl=en&ie=UTF8&q=stella+settlements&fb=1&gl=au&hq=stella+settlements&hnear=Perth+WA&cid=9895804169495459418&z=14

The citations that have been removed are:

http://www.truelocal.com.au/business/stella-settlements/burswood

http://www.hotfrog.com.au/Companies/Stella-Settlements

http://www.yellowpages.com.au/wa/burswood/stella-settlements-13951907-listing.html

(all of these are listed on other competitors citations currently)

(also the places page is using the reviews on Truelocal.com.au listing above which is strange)

Do you know why these citations listings have been removed, however these have not been removed on competitors places pages by Google?

thanks

[Dan-Petrovic]

Hey there,

I can still see TrueLocal but not the others.

The reason could be that somebody has created duplicate listings for this address:

1. http://www.hotfrog.com.au/Companies/Stella-Settlements
2. http://www.hotfrog.com.au/Companies/Superannuation-Investment-Insurance-Advisory-Services
3. http://www.hotfrog.com.au/Companies/Aglink-Planning-Systems

What is this Google Places backhat!?!

I've also noticed a spammer has downvoted this particular listing and what seems to be all his competitors: http://maps.google.com.au/maps/user?uid=201850203609104288979&ptab=1

This is terrible.

[MarieHaynes]

Something funky is going on with our places listing as well.  I think Google is making algo changes and it's messing things up!

Our listing lost its citations.  Then, it was delisted for "not meeting quality guidelines".  I stripped the listing of everything that could possibly be causing the issue (including taking a keyword out of the title that actually was part of our business name).

Then all of a sudden we had two listings.  Our original listing had 4 citations.  The new listing has 122.  It looks like the issue was our address.  Because we are a real estate listing Google thinks that all of the other agents that we share an office with are the same as us.

I'm still deciding on what to do but right now I'm not doing anything because we are #2 in the serps with our places listing and it's bringing us traffic.

My advice would be to do nothing for a few days and see what happens when things settle.  Take a look and see if Google could be considering your address a dup.

[nickydunin]

thanks for the response Dejan. - no, it's not blackhat, it's the other 2 businesses in the same office. It's a shared office. - and yes, looks like someone went through to give every single site in the top 20 besides themselves a 1 star rating - I don't see the true local listing in the maps listing

[nickydunin]

thanks Dunamis.  I see that could be the issue here as there are 3 businesses in the same office here, which could be the reason for loosing the citations on the places page.

[MarieHaynes]

Now the question is what to do about that!  I'd love to know the answer.   It's against Google's TOS to add something like, "Office #1" or "Suite A" to make the address different.

The way I understand it is that if multiple people share an office they're only supposed to have one listing.

[Dan-Petrovic]

Ah that makes sense

This could be a problem for our listing too actually as we're in a big complex with many businesses.

[junioruf]

Google has changed the guidelines for this many times. From what I understand, you need to have one listing for the company (for example, if it is a hospital or an attorneys office... or in your case a real state office). Then, you need to have individual listings for each person in that office (doctor so and so.... attorney so and so... realtor so and so). Hopefully each of you have individual numbers or extensions; or Google may try to merge the listings. I have done this before for a dental office and all worked out fine for each individual dentist as I followed the guidelines.