Google Notifies Google Places Users Of Duplicate Listings Issues

Google is upgrading more and more businesses to the new Google business local dashboard and during that process is running into issues with old listings being duplicate.

Google is sending out emails to business owners with issues with instructions on how to repair the duplicate issue and move forward with the upgrade.

Jade Wang from Google posted in the Google Business Helpforums a snippet of the email and then in detail described the issues and how to address them.

The email reads:

We'd like to inform you that Google Places no longer accommodates more than one authorized owner per business location. Your account contains one or more listings that have been identified as duplicates of other listings and as a result, some of the information you provide will not be shown to Google users anymore...

There are two issues where this can be triggered:

(1) Your account and another account that you don't control became verified for the same business using the old Places dashboard.

(2) You may have verified the page multiple times using accounts you control.

In each case, Jade describes how to repair the issue so you can continue with your upgrade.

For more details see the Google Business Help thread for those details.

Forum discussion at Google Business Help.

Google: Don't Worry If Your Google Webmaster Tools Preview Is Wrong

You know that often, Google Webmaster Tools shows an image preview of your site's home page on the dashboard listing view of your site profiles within Google Webmaster Tools.

What if the image of your site is wrong? Should you be concerned? Google's John Mueller implies it is really not something to be too concerned about.

In a Google Webmaster Help thread, one person was concerned because his mobile site was displayed in the preview and not his main site. John said, don't "give too much weight to these preview images."

I wouldn't give too much weight to these preview images -- they're not meant to be a representation of how Googlebot crawls the page. If you do see something wrong there, I'd still follow up to see where it came from, but it's not something that would be affecting how we index & rank your website. From what I can tell here, we do recognize your website appropriately, and can pick up the smartphone version. Since the homepage has a very different response size depending on the version that you serve, one way to dig into the details could be to check your server logs, comparing size with the user-agent that made the request, to double-check that your real users get the correct version.

These previews don't represent what Googlebot crawls or your indexing and ranking. It is likely just a style thing for Webmaster Tools.