Since I can’t talk to a support person, and I need to show you exactly what I’m seeing, I hope this post will help. The problem from day one has been the inability to get rid of this bad listing. When I click on the link provided in the help forum, this is what I see:
There are two choices – edit this listing and business owner.
If I click on edit this place, it takes me to the listing page.
There is no delete or suspend this listing on this page. I even tried deleting everything and that didn’t work. There is an option to claim the listing. More on that in a minute. So that leaves me with the second option, which is to click the business owner link (note: I am logging in with my client’s credentials).
Here is what I see when I click on the business owner link:
So I have three choices: edit, suspend, this is not my listing. Obviously the one that applies is suspend this listing. So now we run into the next problem.
This screen gives me only one option, which is to send a postcard to the address shown. It is highly unlikely that any postcard sent to the address above will find its way to the business owner. One, this airport is closed. The location no longer exists. the address doesn’t even mention the company name. It has been over six months since the airport closed and I’m not sure that the mail would be forwarded to the proper address. I can’t change the address. All I can do is enter something into the contact name field. The name, though, is correct.
Additionally, the phone number listed no longer belongs to the business owner. When I went through this process over six months ago, we (me and the business owner) had to make several phone calls to the new owner of the phone number ( an elderly lady who was not cooperative) to finally convince her that we were not trying to scam her and that all we wanted was for her to give is the PIN that was automatically generated. As I said, this was all done six months ago. We successfully claimed the listing and then promptly deleted the listing. Yet here we are six plus months later and not only do we still have the listing, but now it’s even harder to get rid of it.
Just so you know. Since the only option I have is for Google to send a postcard and hope that it is redirected to the new location, I have selected that option.
Now the second issue concerning phone numbers. If I understand your comments, you’re telling me to delete the alternate phone number and fax number. Here is the screenshot of the correct listing:
This makes absolutely no sense to me. Why would Google have entries for alternate phone number and a FAX number if entering anything in these fields is going to create problems with meeting quality guidelines? Does that make sense to you?
So even though it doesn’t make sense to have to delete phone numbers that every business has. I’ve done so in an attempt to fix the quality guidelines issue.
I hope that this post clarifies the many problems we have encountered with Google Places and how the lack of any real support has contributed to our inability to correct this problem.
Any help that you can give us would be appreciated.