Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Multiple listings may not be duplicates

One complaint often raised is that Google Maps shows lots of duplicates. Maybe yes, maybe no. Here's one I ran into today. Mid-America Industrial Park, Pryor, OK. At first, it appears there are four conflicting/duplicate listings.

But a closer look shows that, in fact, these are separate listings, just with similar names.

Location A is the office mail/delivery location, as given on their web site.
Location B is the "Main Office". Different phone #.
Location C is the actual location of the industrial park. Same phone # as A
Location D is the "Water Plant Division". Different phone #.

This is something you see frequently in Google Maps. It's clear that they would rather err on the side of showing more information, even if it often seems that the listings should be grouped together.

So, the lesson learned. Pay close attention to the listing title and phone number. It pays.

2 comments:

SEOWonk said...

Have you heard of any issues with Google considering multiple listings spam? One situation that I'm thinking of is where a single business at a single location has multiple agents that would like to be highlighted individually - as people might recognize their names individually. They sometimes have even the same phone number. Would it be spam to list each separately?

Anonymous said...

The problem I am having is a competitor using multiple fake addresses to dominate the map listing on a local search. The business has one location but they use multiple fake and residential addresses to flood the map. The truth is that map on the first page of a search is prime real estate and it’s free. A postal inspector told me that it is possibly mail fraud and I should make a formal complaint. What do you think?