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Google+ Local Dashboard Duplicate Listings, How to Delete Them & How To Measure its Effectiveness

2 years later, and some can see the light at the end of the tunnel. From the good ‘ol days of using a simplistic, and effective back end system to add your business to Google Maps, to today’s clunky, and somewhat ineffective dashboard – it all seems to make sense.

Not only for our clients, but even for our own company, you can see remnants of the ‘switch’ in your account. If you’ve logged into your Google+ Local dashboard recently, and have seen more than one company listing, you’re not alone. Though, what are you to do with these listings?

These un-editable, unverified listings in your dashboard are really just an artifact of how Google made the transition from the old Places to the new Places/Plus.

Mike Blumenthal, owner of Blumenthal’s states.

Previously both environments (old Places and Plus) were able to send data to the canonical listing. Now that the old dashboard has been nuked, effectively Google is just saying that the old listing can no longer provide data to the cluster.

Thus having an unverified listing is just a reflection of that editing transition and not anything in and of itself that could impact current listings.

So, should you delete these ‘artifact/duplicate’ listings?

Well the verdict is still out, but according to my colleagues (and my personal opinion):

They are strictly an artifact of the process. There seems little value in keeping them around. The deletion messaging is scary but does nothing.

Before deleting, you should make sure that there aren’t duplicates in the index and that the listing to be deleted doesn’t lead to one of them. We have seen cases where that has happened and the deletion has lead to problems. Usually not, but worth checking before you delete.

Step by Step guide on how to delete these ‘Artifact / Duplicate Listings’

 Multiple Listings

Step 1. Log into your places dashboard (places.google.com)

Duplicate Listings

Step 2. If you click ‘edit’ on an ‘unverified’ listing it will take you to the pages dashboard and show this message, if it’s a duplicate

Remove Listing

Step 3. To delete the duplicate listing, scroll to the bottom of the ‘edit’ page and click ‘Remove this Listing’

 

Deleting Duplicate Artifact

Step 4. You’ll get this scary message saying ‘are you sure you want to delete this account’ … which of course … you do … right?

How to measure the effectiveness of these changes:

  • “Real” Metrics – Annotate in Google Analytics and see if you’re getting more traffic and more conversions from local sources, and Google Maps as the main referrer.

  • “Visual” Metrics – Use a tool like Bright Local to check rankings, either ad hoc or schedule a report (though I wouldn’t bet your house on this) and I would really get out of a habit of focusing on ‘rankings’ with your client as this is a recipe for disaster and promotes some ‘hard to answer questions’.

  • Google+ Local Insights – Check the Google+ Local Insights tab in your Dashboard and compare if you’re getting more impressions / actions than you were before.

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