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Bing Places Listings for Real Estate Agents in the same office?
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We've got a client that has a number of real estate agents that operate out of the same location. There are clear guidelines for how to approach this with Google My Business (https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en) but I'm having no luck finding resources as it relates to Bing Places and individual practitioners. Does anyone have experience with this within Bing? Essentially the client wants to maintain the office itself as a location, and there are agents that want to create/claim pages that would utilize the same address.
Thanks
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Hi Eric!
You are right on that Bing's guidelines are actually pretty similar to Google's. Just wanted to take a second to mention, though, that the practice of creating fictitious suite numbers is not recommended and not necessary. Back in the day, Google did have the worst time parsing out individual practitioners or businesses at a shared address, with merged listings often resulting. This is no longer the case; Google has really improved in being able to parse this out, provided practitioners follow some basic safety steps like obeying naming conventions, having unique phone numbers, choosing different categories and ensuring that each practitioner has his/her own landing page on the website.
The recommendation to create fictitious suite numbers stems from the days when merging was such an issue, affecting thousands (millions?) of medical practices, legal practices, real estate firms, etc. in their ability to list themselves properly on Google. But, these days, it's much more important to be sure that you're only listing a real-world address, and you can do so with pretty good confidence that Google will understand that lawyers A, B and C all work at 123 Main St, and that the listings won't merge, provided you've followed all the guidelines to the letter.
Hope it helps to know this, and I hope you'll keep participating as we all continue learning Local together - a never-ending process!
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Hey There!
Yes, I so agree ... Bing's guidelines are very spare, but they do allow practitioner listings, just like Google. Here's an example in the wild:
Best practice: just as with Google, be sure you've got a unique phone number for each agent (not shared with the practice or any other agent) and be sure you're linking practitioner Bing Places to practitioner landing pages on the website. Also a good idea to not share categories, whenever possible.
I'm with you in wishing Bing's guidelines spelled things out more clearly, as Google's do.
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Your best bet is to make sure you comply with Google's guidelines, the Bing guidelines are typically similar.
It also depends on how the business relationship is set up. If they're independent contractors of the company then it would be different than if they were employees of the company.
Generally speaking, we typically recommend setting up "suite numbers" for the business location, and those need to be clearly marked at the location. I have heard of cases where Google has looked to make sure that this is the case.
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