Inconsistant & Duplicate Listings

[theideapeople]

Hey guys,

Our agency inherited a client that no longer has all of their log-in information for a large number of listings. This is killing their rankings. Can anyone give us some advice on how to handle this? We subscribe to Moz Local, but it seems like it can only help so much (or so we think).

Thanks in advanced for any advice!

[MiriamEllis]

Hey There!

I want to be sure that you understand how to interpret your Moz Local listing score, and have a good sense of what Moz Local is doing for and what you can take manual action on.

When you sign into your Moz Local dashboard and click on a business listing there, you are taken to a business details page where you will see your overall listing score. This score is comprised of your status on the 7 partner sites in our network + the status of your listings on 8 non-partner sites, as well.

The 7 supported partner sites in our network are:
Factual
Foursquare
Neustar/Localeze
Infogroup
Best of the Web
Acxiom
Superpages

Once you’ve uploaded your listing to Moz Local, it’s our job to push your data out to the above 7 partner sites. Your overall listing score will begin to rise as each of the above listings achieves updated status. The rise may be gradual rather than instantaneous, but should be noticeable over time. You should be sure you’ve filled out as many details as possible on your listing so that it can achieve a maximum score. If you’ve filled out all of these fields, you’re good to go on this and it’s our job to take it from there, pushing out your data to the 7 partners. As each partner achieves updated status, your listing score will gradually begin to rise.

Apart from this, you can contribute to a rise in your listing score manually by improving your listings on the non-partner sites shown on the details page. These non-partner sites are:

Google
Facebook
Yelp
Hotfrog
YP
Citysearch
Yahoo!
Bing

On the details page, if you discover that we are reporting issues to you under the ‘Inconsistent’ and ‘Incomplete’ tabs on any of the above non-partner sites, you should consider taking manual action to correct these things. This activity on your part will also eventually contribute to a rise in your listing score. However, if you don't have login information for these sites, your ability to work on these non-partner sites is definitely going to be limited. You may need to work at contacting each of the platforms individually to see if they can help you regain control of the listings.

Finally, if our tool also surfaces duplicate listings for you, you’ll want to pay close attention to these. If the duplicates are on any of the 7 partner sites, you can simply click the ‘close’ button. If they are on the non-partner sites, clicking the close button will take you to a page on the associated site where you will need to work manually with the platform to request closure of the duplicate. Again, you may need to do some spadework to see if these non-partner platforms can help you get back in control of the listings.

Taken altogether, the work we are doing to push your data to the 7 partner sites and the work you do on the non-partner sites will contribute to a rise in your listing score.

I hope this helps you feel fully informed about our service and your opportunities! Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you have any further questions.

[Bryan_Loconto]

The old "client doesn't have their login info" scenario! If I had a dime for each time we heard this story... I'd be a Shark on the show Shark Tank.

Anyway, I agree with sachin-sv. You should try claiming the account first and verifying via postcard. If that doesn't work, I'd certainly try reaching out to Google support.

Good luck!

[Linda-Vassily]

I had this happen when we had someone leave the company without documenting one of our logins. The way I reclaimed access was as sachin-sv said, I claimed the account in question and they verified ownership (with a postcard mailed to the physical address).

[sachin-sv]

You can try to claim it with a new account.  Make a new account, add a business, and use the same details as the listing you are trying to claim.  (business name, phone number, address)  It should bring up the old listing and ask if it is yours.  Say yes, and then you will have to verify.

If that does not work then you can contact Google team here- https://support.google.com/business/#contact=1&topic=4539639

Hope this helps!