Google Maps can be a mess. Often it can produce duplicate listings for business(s) which can cause many issues when you are trying to get your Google Map Listing to rank well (ideally within the 7-Pack).
Sometimes its Google Map’s fault and other times it’s Merchant’s fault for not understanding how Google Maps works. Regardless of how you ended up with a duplicate listings, its never a good thing.
When you have a duplicate listing it causes inconsistencies which can result in unwanted merges, division of reviews and/or citations and a myriad of other unwanted actions.
If you find yourself with double listings on your business, here is how to merge properly them according to Google:
I follow these exact instructions often and it works like a charm.
Out every 10 clients I have, I find 30-40% of them have some sort of duplicate listing issues. This is typical and a fairly easy fix.
Now this only works if your duplicate listing is “not claimed”. If you find your listing is “claimed” and you do not have logins for it then it could be hijacked. In this case you need to go to the Google Map Help Forum and begin a thread, and pray the Google Gods that an G-Map employee will read your thread and investigate it. This is one reason to make sure you have claimed your listing(s), just for security sake. I can’t tell you how many listings in Google, Yahoo, & Bing are unclaimed – Crazy!
Let us know if you have any questions about merging Google Maps in the comment section below.
I followed these steps
Will i loose my reviews
@neel you should not lose your reviews if you follow these merging instructions. In fact, once all your listings are merged into 1 listing you should notice ranking improvement with Google Maps.
i think the above doesn’t apply anymore. see what google suggests now…..
http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=183009