Mind Boggling GMB Merge Issue
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A bit complicated of a situation, and one I have never experienced before. Ill do my best to explain:
To start: I operate 10+ GMB listings for a brand with multiple locations. The listings in question are our main brand account, representing our headquarters and largest location, and a smaller sub-brand that represents a unique portion of our business at the same physical location with its own staff, hours, entrance, etc. Both are completely legitimate and have been for years, despite sharing the same physical address (think of a retail store inside a resort).
About 2 months ago i opened GMB and the system had automatically merged the 2 listings. They were flagged as duplicated due to the address issue. Ok, fine, no problem. After several chats and a call with GMB verifying they were unique businesses and confirming the issue they agreed to un-merge the listings.
Once un-merged, we noticed a strange issue. The organic relevance in both maps and knowledge panel had been transferred from our main brand listing to the sub-brand. When querying anything that would trigger our maps listing or the knowledge panel the sub-brands account was now magically showing, including its landing page, phone number, etc.
After countless chats / emails / calls with GMB i finally reached someone who understood the issue. This was escalated to GMBs technical team and they returned with the answer that they had never seen this before. Great. More importantly, they returned with the answer they could not correct the problem OR force the 2 listings back together. At this point, we were receiving a very large call volume to the sub-business that was meant for our main brand. After many back and forth's with Google's team, the recommended solution outside of deal with it, was to essentially change the information on the sub-brand to match the main brand page. The hope being the system would automatically merge them again. A bit crazy, but we didnt have much of a choice.
That was 2 months ago. Our sub-brand page, now essentially hi-jacked to look like our main brand, receives close to 200k views a month. Our old main brand page still receives around 30 - 50k month. Clearly this is not ideal.
Any recommendations on a solution? Happy to completely lose the sub-brand account, but its ranking and relevance has now become hugely important.
My preference would be to merge the 2, but I am unsure if that will negatively impact the ranking. Our original brand account has thousands of reviews, is linked to our YouTube, etc. We would need to remove the sub-brand account that has now taken priority in search and request GMB merge it into the old account.
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Ugh. Yeah - sorry - no more bright ideas forthcoming from our side. I think you have a clear-eyed view of the risks and difficulties of the different options. Sorry I don't have anything more substantial for you. Good luck!
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Thanks Will -- appreciate the response. Thats my reaction too. Over the years i've managed 40+ GMB accounts from small to large, and have come to expect a bit of a back and forth to get through some of the more complex issues. Never run into this before and feel like I have escalated it as high as I can go.
I'll continue to ping our contact at GMB. Last I spoke with him he had no more advice. We've pursued our contacts on the Ad side as well, we have a six figure spend with Google, no dice there either.
At this point I think my best bet is to wait until we get through our core sales season, and then try and force a merge to see what happens.
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Firstly - wow - after speaking to a few folks here (at Distilled), we're surprised that you've had such an honest (but useless) answer from the GMB team.
I'm going to continue asking around / seeing if anyone has any genuinely bright or authoritative ideas for you, but on a first pass if I were in your shoes, my first step would be to go back to the people you've already escalated to and continue trying to escalate further / get them to look into it with even more technical people. You can describe what you are continuing to see as you did here, and hopefully it can help them debug. This feels by far the safest option at this stage.
I'll come back to you if anyone comes up with any better ideas though.
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