A while back the Yellow Pages were delivered to my apartment. After a couple of weeks I decided that I was never going to use them, so I took it downstairs to the recycling bin only to find it overflowing with yellow directories. While businesses continue to spend big money on Yellow Pages, consumers are moving to the internet, especially for local businesses and services.

Google responded to this demand a few years ago by creating Google Places formerly known as Google Local Business. Google Places allows businesses to literally put themselves on the map, and with a little SEO help they can achieve a prominent position on the first page of search results, like the Vancouver pubs shown below.

The process of signing up to Google local business is quick and easy. Create a Google account, sign up to Google places, enter your business information, and validate your listing by punching in the 5-digit pin that Google will call, mail or sms to you.

From there on in, however, it can get messy. The whole program is notoriously full of glitches and is open wide to abuse. The most common problem users find is a duplicate Google Places listing, which may seem innocuous enough, but can cause major issues down the line.

There are several ways that listings can be duplicated in the Google Places system. The most common duplication happens when a listing is entered into Google Places by Yellow Pages and by the business owner.

Having two listings is confusing for users, hard to keep track of, and can cause Google to delete both listings. Merging the two into one listing is important.

Google gives this advice to merge the listings:

1. Claim the listing that isn’t yours. To do this, go into the listing by clicking on blue ‘reviews’ or ‘more information’ link on Google Maps.

2.  Pick the best listing. The listing with more links under the ‘more about this place’ tab and the most customer reviews is usually preferred by Google when it comes to rankings, so pick this one.

3. Delete all enhanced information out of the listing you want to get rid of such as categories, photos, and videos. Only keep the business title, phone number and address and make sure these match the information in the listing you want to keep.

4. Wait for two weeks, the two listings will have merged into one by then.

5. Once the listings have been merged, your Google Places Account will still show the duplicate listing, all you will need to do now is delete the duplicate listing.

I hope this has been helpful to those who had recently asked me about duplicate listings in Google Places and those out there who might be wondering how to delete their duplicate listings.

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