Two listings, half the reviews
Duplicate Google listings split your reviews and your ranking between two profiles. Here is how to find yours and get them merged.
You have forty reviews. A customer tells you they nearly went somewhere else because you only had eighteen.
They were not wrong and neither are you. There are two listings for your business on Google. Half your reviews landed on one and half on the other, and whichever one that customer found made you look half the size you actually are.
Duplicate listings are one of the more common problems we run into and one of the least written about, probably because it is a dull subject. It is worth ten minutes of your time anyway, because the damage compounds quietly.
How you end up with two
Nobody creates a duplicate on purpose. They arrive a few different ways.
You moved. The old address kept its listing and a new one got created at the new address.
The business name changed. A rebrand, a change of ownership, dropping "and Sons." The old name kept its own profile.
Somebody added you. A customer put your business on Maps years ago without knowing you already had a listing.
A franchise or supplier created one. Some networks create listings for their members. Some directory services do it as part of a package.
You claimed one without realising another existed. Very common. You searched, did not find yourself, created a listing, and the auto generated one carried on separately.
What it costs you
Your reviews get split. The most obvious damage. Two profiles at eighteen and twenty two look far weaker than one at forty, and review count is one of the first things people scan.
Your ranking gets split. Google is weighing two entities that are actually one business. Neither one accumulates the full signal.
Your information drifts. You update the listing you know about. The other one keeps the old phone number and the old hours indefinitely.
You cannot reply to half your reviews, if the duplicate is unclaimed or claimed by someone else.
Find out whether you have one
Try each of these. It takes about five minutes.
Search your business name on Google Maps and look at the results carefully, not just the top one. Duplicates often sit further down and look slightly different, a shortened name or a different category.
Search your phone number as a search term. If two listings come back, you have your answer.
Search your old address if you have moved, and your old business name if it changed.
Search the street you are on with your category, for example "auto repair" and the street name, and scan the map for pins in roughly your location.
The duplicate frequently has fewer photos, no owner replies, and slightly stale information, which is a useful signal when you are deciding which listing is the one you actually control.
Getting them merged
The process depends on the state of the duplicate.
If the duplicate is unclaimed, the cleanest route is to claim it, so both listings are under your control, and then report the duplicate through Google Business Profile support. Google merges them.
If you own both, you can report the duplicate from within your account and ask for a merge.
If somebody else claimed the duplicate, request ownership. Google notifies whoever holds it, and if they do not respond within seven days it transfers to you.
A few honest points about how the merge goes. Google is usually good about carrying reviews across, but not always, and it does not happen instantly. Merges can take a few weeks. And you generally cannot merge two listings that are at genuinely different addresses, because Google reads that as two locations rather than a duplicate. In that case the old one should be marked permanently closed rather than merged, which preserves the reviews on the record while telling customers it is not where you are anymore.
Do not delete the duplicate outright if you can avoid it. Deleting can take the reviews with it. Merging keeps them.
We see this a lot
Looking at 44 independent businesses in Fredericton earlier this year, six had more than one listing on Maps. Dental practices, heating companies, an electrical contractor and a roofer among them.
Every one of them had review counts split across the two, and in most cases the second listing had no photos and had not been touched in years.
None of those owners knew. That is the pattern with this particular problem. There is no notification and nothing looks wrong from the inside, because the listing you look at is the one you manage.
What to do this week
Search your business name, your phone number, and your old address if you have one. Look past the first result.
If you find a second listing, note whether it is claimed and how many reviews are sitting on it. That tells you how urgent this is and which route you need.
If you would rather not deal with Google support, cleaning up duplicates is part of what we do when we set up a profile properly. Our free review will at least tell you whether you have the problem.
Call +1 506-801-9970 or email info@qhike.ca. We serve Fredericton, Moncton, Saint John and all of New Brunswick.