Got Duplicates? Help for Local Business Center users

In some cases, adding listings, claiming listings, and correcting other information on Google Maps can lead to duplicates of your listing appearing in your Local Business Center account. In the Help Forum, we often get questions about how to remove these duplicates. These are the steps that we recommend:

Disclaimer: Before you get started, it's important to remember that a listing contains information merged from multiple sources. Suspending a duplicate listing could cause the original listing to be removed from Maps, because all sources of information for both the original and the duplicate might be suppressed.

1. Choose the listing that you'd prefer to keep in your account. Make sure that you have all your enhanced content (photos, business hours, description) attached to this listing and this listing only.
2. For duplicates of this listing in your account (the ones you want to remove), remove all enhanced information. Keep only required information, like the business title, address, and onephone number.
   
3. Submit these changes and verify as necessary.
4. Now, sit tight for a couple of weeks - just for good measure.
5. Delete the duplicates from your account, choosing Remove this listing from my Local Business Center account.

That's it! Now you should only have one entry to control the details of your business listing. Be patient with updating certain kinds of information, like pictures -- they should eventually appear in Maps.

Joel Headley, Google Maps team

UPDATED instructions (also in this FAQ) - Updated May 27, 2010

Do multiple results for your business appear in Google Maps search results?

If so, you can fix it by following these steps:

1. Make sure you've claimed one of the listings in Google Places. Verify that there’s only one active listing in your account by logging in to your Google Places account.
   1. If there's more than one listing in your account for the same business, you’ll first need to fix that problem by following the steps in the section below.
   2. If you don't have a listing for it at all, you should claim your business.
2. For every extra result for your business, go to its Place Page, click the Report A Problem link, and select "Place has another listing". If you can, include a link to your claimed place page in the comments section.
3. Google will review these reports and fix duplicate business listings.

Are there multiple listings in your Google Places account for the same business location?

When you log in to your Google Places account, if you have multiple listings for the same location, that can be a violation of the content guidelines. You should avoid having duplicates in your account. Here’s how to ensure you have only one listing per business location:

1. Choose the listing that you'd prefer to keep in your account.
   1. Make sure that you have all your enhanced content (photos, business hours, description) attached to this listing.
   2. Make sure that its status is "active".
2. Delete all other listings for the same business from your account. Choose the "Remove this listing from my Google Places account" option
3. These changes can take several weeks to appear in search results
4. If there are multiple results for your business in Google’s search results, follow the instructions above.