Hide Your Business Address or Lose Your Listing?! Plus a Place Page Update Schedule
Earlier this month in the Google Place Page help forums a Googler posted a topic responding to a lot of questions about new listings and updating existing listings. A list of new turnaround times was posted to help people know when to expect changes to their Place Pages to take effect. This is what it looked like:
Usually Updates in a Few Days:
- Newly verified listings (even though it reads Active on your dashboard)
- Business titles
- Addresses
- Phone Numbers
- Web site URLs
- Pin marker Moves
- Descriptions
- Hours
- Categories
Usually Updates in About a Week:
- Photos
- Videos
May take Several Weeks:
- Merged listings
- Duplicate listings
Businesses Dropped From Local Listings Over Service Area Confusion
Recently some business owners have found that their Google local map listings have disappeared entirely without any warning or explanation. After some scrambled to figure out what happened to their previously strong listing, an obscure passage of the Places Help Files emerged to explain the problem:
What are my options when defining a service area?
Don't receive customers at your location? Serve customers at their location? Select the "Do not show my business address on my Maps listing" option within your dashboard. If you don't hide your address, your listing may be removed from Google Maps.
Yup, that's right, if you don't use your business's location to directly serve customers, Google may remove your listing from Google Maps unless you hide your address. It used to be that this was a silly and foolish idea to hide your address from Google Maps because people clearly want to find the nearest place to them, and without it your local listings would surely suffer.
However, the previous downsides to hiding your address have been shown to be gone now and with this policy being enforced by Google, it will just level the playing field between businesses near and far despite their address.
Not sure w...
