If you were among the many business owners who received an email like this recently:
you were probably wondering what you should do, if Google was going to shut you down, if you'd done something wrong, or any other number of chilling thoughts!
Google is cleaning up the Places realm, which is good news. They seem to be gathering together all the different Places pages a business might have rolling around out there and congregating them on the new Places Dashboard:
This letter is telling you that you have more than one listing and you should remove the extraneous listings right away. Make sure you're logged into Google, then click the link on your email. This will bring you to your Places Dashboard. You will have more than one listing, since you received the letter.
Look for the little verification badge next to the business name:
Don't delete that one! That is your verified Places listing. Delete the other listing(s). The way to do this is to click the button to the right of the listing that says "Edit". When the page opens, it will probably have a red warning banner:
Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the link that says, "Remove this listing"
Then follow the prompts to delete the listing, which can be pretty intimidating, depending on how they are presented. Don't worry, you aren't deleting your Google account, you are only deleting an extra unverified Google Places listing.
Now you should be left with only the verified Places listing in your dashboard:
If you haven't received an email, but would like to see your Places dashboard anyway, make sure you're logged in to Google, then go to : https://www.google.com/business/placesforbusiness/. You may have to click the "Sign In" link in the upper right corner, go ahead and do that.
You may see something like the page above, or you may see something that looks like the old Places dashboard, it depends on where you are in Google's process of moving everyone to the new dashboard.
If you want to get your Places dashboard all cleaned up, but aren't feeling super confident, contact me (annie@acorn-is.com) and I can usually get you fixed up in 30 minutes or less. This will be billed at our normal consulting rates.
Annie Buck
Social Media, Local and Education Manager
Acorn IS
