Local businesses have gotten a huge boost out of the local search engines and the biggest boost comes from Google Maps.  Unfortunately Google has made a mess of their effort in numerous ways. One of the ways Google is messing up its own map listings and tripping up small businesses is the rather unsophisticated way in which it collects and displays business listings for Google Maps.  Pulling information from across the Internet and then not cross checking the information that they’ve gathered means that many if not most of the businesses they display have more than one listing with slight variations. An example of this is a dentist may have a listing under their clinic name but then because the local chamber of commerce or the Better Business Bureau lists their business followed by the dentists name they end up with two listings.

What you’ll commonly see once there are two listings for a business is that they gather slightly different information.  For example, Google will assign the pages that link to the business differently to the different listings.  This means that one listing may have some of the pages that link to it while the other link shows different pages.  Anyone researching the business gets a partial picture of the business.  And it’s not just linking pages.  Because different users find different listings, one user might leave a review on the first listing while another user leaves a referral on the second listing.

To make matters worse Google doesn’t provide a clean way for a business owner to consolidate the listing.  The best thing for searches would be if the business owner could go into Google’s Local Business Center claim both listings and then click a button to consolidate listings.  Unfortunately, this feature doesn’t exist.  Instead after claiming both listings a business owner is forced to choose which one to suspend, potentially leaving out reviews and third party pages that link to the business.

Ultimately, the best case scenario would be for Google to handle all of this automatically by simply looking to see if the phone number  and address are the same and if the business name is similar.  However, until this happens they should implement a clean consolidation feature in the Local Business Center.