Hi Miriam,

Thanks for the link, I will report this incorrect edits to the Google My Business forum.

Thank you so much for your help.

Regards,

Varun

Hi Miriam Ellis,

Thank you so much for your response.

I totally agree with you that "Suggest an Edit" is Google's feature and not a mistake. But editing done by anonymous get published without owner's permission is something could be an issue as it gives everyone the authority to destroy anyone's business as my friend had faced huge down fall in traffic and ranking as well.

In my opinion, anonymous changes should not get live until the owner approves them manually.

In my case, the changes made by anonymous were incorrect and most probably made by any of the competitors. The incorrect information got live without my friend's approval.

Considering this my question is "Is it right in Google's part to allow anyone to edit business information without owner's permission", is there any way out to prevent this?"

"Suggest an Edit" feature of Google My Business is allowing the competitors to change your business details, that too without your prior permission!

I have put together a piece on the issue we faced and you can review the same here:

https://www.kvrwebtech.com/blog/issue-in-suggest-an-edit-in-google-my-business-is-it-a-bug-or-a-major-pitfall/

What are your thoughts on the same and what should be the right solution?

Hi Abs,

Changing brand and domain name are very crucial steps, so it requires proper attention and good strategy prior to the implementation. These changes can have the serious impact on the SEO work and branding you have ever done.

Below is the list of recommendation that you should follow:

1. Redirect all the old website URLs to the relevant URLs of the new website

2. Keep a close eye on Google webmaster to analyze and fix 404 errors

3. If you have subdomains linking to old website, redirect them to the new domain

4. Setup sitemap for your new domain

5. Do press release for your new brand so that visitors can know about the change

6. Perform Google Adwords for rebranding message like We have shifted to a new brand.

After following above steps, keep analysing your website to check the impact of domain change and rebranding on your website. So that you can fix the problems as soon as possible.

The real example of rebranding is Odesk, which has become Upwork now. You can get the detailed information of my mentioned point in the below link:

http://searchengineland.com/odesk-upwork-migrate-domain-not-kill-seo-223494

Hope this will help.

Regards,
Varun

Hi,

I would like to know have you updated your sitemap? If not Kindly update it on the website as well as add the sitemap in Google Webmaster tool.

You can block old urls which you do not want to get indexed.

Yes it will affect the traffic as there are two different pages of same services which will distributes the customers.

Hi,

Yes, if you put any url in the robots.txt it will not be shown in the search results after some time even if your pages were already indexed. Because when your disallow urls in the robots.txt , Google will stop crawling that page and eventually will stop indexing those pages.

Hi,

If you have made changes in the content also with title tags then Google may index it withing six days. But if you have just made changes in the title tags only then it will take 3-4 weeks or more.

Also for fast indexing you can request Google to re-crawl your site in Google Webmaster.

Hi,

If you have made changes in the content also with title tags then Google may index it withing six days. But if you have just made changes in the title tags only then it will take 3-4 weeks or more.

Also for fast indexing you can request Google to re-crawl your site in Google Webmaster.

"Suggest an Edit" feature of Google My Business is allowing the competitors to change your business details, that too without your prior permission!

I have put together a piece on the issue we faced and you can review the same here:

https://www.kvrwebtech.com/blog/issue-in-suggest-an-edit-in-google-my-business-is-it-a-bug-or-a-major-pitfall/

What are your thoughts on the same and what should be the right solution?

Hi,

Yes, if you put any url in the robots.txt it will not be shown in the search results after some time even if your pages were already indexed. Because when your disallow urls in the robots.txt , Google will stop crawling that page and eventually will stop indexing those pages.