How To Report and Remove Fake or Duplicate Google Business Profile Listings

With the increasing number of businesses competing to make their mark in the digital landscape, staying authentic and avoiding duplicating profiles or products can become challenging. While you remain authentic and original, you might likely face duplicate or fake profiles of your business. Among many online directories that enable you to establish a business profile and reach a broader base of potential customers, one of the most reliable and efficient platforms is Google Business Profile.

It helps brands build reliable and prominent business profiles to increase their online presence and search ranking. Duplicate or fake profiles on Google Business listings can create negative impressions of your brand, impacting your previous and new customers, SEO efforts, and search rankings.

They can confuse or mislead customers with numerous business listings. Multiple listings for the same business also go against Google’s guidelines of brand representation and can lead to many technical issues. This article explores methods of avoiding, reporting, and removing such duplicate or fake Google Business Profile listings.

What is Google Business Profile?

Google Business Profile, previously known as Google My Business, is Google’s platform for building and maintaining your business’s online presence. It updates your business on Google searches and other applications, like Google Maps and Reviews. You can create your business profile with your Name, Address, Phone number (NAP information), website link, operational hours, and photos.

Google verifies your business information and allows you to create a personalized business profile with customizable product information, photos, and offers. You can also add pictures of your storefront or service area and handle your business’s first impression for your customers. There are several benefits of Google Business Profile, including enhancing your search engine performance and ranking and making it easy for potential new customers to find you.

So, to create a verified and authentic business profile on Google, ensure adherence to Google’s policies for business profiles and avoid its violations by ensuring there are no fake listings of your business on Google.

Why are Fake Profiles Created?

There are several reasons why fake or duplicate Google Business Profile listings might be created, including intentionally and unintentionally created listings.

●  One reason is that several people have added the same business on Google Maps without any bad intent, which adds all these listings to Google Businesses.

●  Sometimes, people from the same business may unknowingly create more than one business listing. For instance, an old employee may have made an incomplete listing for your business, and you created another without knowing about the previous one.

●  A malicious and dangerous reason why fake listings get created is scammers. These are the listings that can potentially harm your business image. They could do this to hold the listing and use it to get money from the owners.

Fortunately, Google has strict criteria for business ownership and eligibility, which marks out the business listing created through the above means and may be duplicates or fake. Google’s policies make reporting and removing such listings convenient and easy for its users.

How to Remove a Duplicate Google Business Profile

To report duplicate or fake Google Business Profiles, whether an old or duplicate profile or a maliciously created fake listing, there are several ways to remove and avoid them. The most prominent ways, according to the types of duplicate profiles, are discussed below:

1. Merging Duplicate Google Business Profiles

If a business has more than two profiles and appears actively on Google Maps, it might be due to one of the reasons listed above. The easiest way to remove an inactive listing is to merge them both.

You can become eligible to merge Google listings of the same business if you can claim and represent that business as yours authentically. To do so, consult Google’s policies on merging business listings. Google will then review your suggestion, verify your authenticity, and accept your suggestion once verified.

2. Reporting Duplicate Google Business Profiles

If there is a fake listing created by another person unintentionally or by a scammer that you are not authorized to activate or remove, you can report its unauthenticity to Google support. Google will review your suggestion, verify it, and remove the fake listing accordingly. You can also check Google Support’s instructions on reporting a duplicate profile listing.

3. Report a Maliciously Fake Google Business Profile

Another issue that businesses might face is fake profiles created by scammers for malicious purposes. In such cases, merging your business profile with an older or updated profile or reporting an accidentally created duplicate listing is not as easy as it might seem.

Specifically, created fake profiles are crafted to match your business listing and might even copy your business information available online to mislead or scam your customers or exhort money from your business by hoarding your listing. To report to Google Support to remove such a listing, you will need to fill out Google Buisness’s Redressal Form. It asks for precise information about your impacted business and alerts Google of a malicious account to take action.

Google takes fake and malicious content or listings seriously and follows strict rules against them. With this form, Google Support immediately verifies your business and removes the malicious listing.

How to Avoid Fake Google Business Profile Listings

You can take a few small and consistent measures to ensure and minimize the number of duplicate listings of your business on Google. An easy guide is given below:

●  Claim your business, and use Google’s verification process to verify your business,

●  Check your business's existing listings before creating a new listing.

●  If your business has an existing listing, consider updating it instead of creating a new listing.

●  If there are duplicate listings, previous or new, report them and keep updated about new duplicate listings.

●  If you move your location, change your address and update your previous listing instead of creating a new one.

●  Educate and train your employees to manage your business profiles and avoid extra or additional duplicate listings accidentally created by them.

Conclusion

Fake or duplicate Google business profiles can mislead your customers, harm your SEO and Google search rankings, and lead to several technical issues. Keep an eye out for duplicate and fake listings, and report and remove then with Google Support timely. You can also take additional measures to avoid the creation of such listings.