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For the past few years Google has used a service to phone verify hi-jacked listings. If a competitor or customer contacts Google and reports the business listing as being closed or incorrectly listed Google would normally call the number listed in the Google Places account and they would identify themselves as Google and ask to verify some listing information. This process usually worked out okay but due to a huge increase in the amount of Spam being pushed into Google Places they have started outsourcing much of the workload to a call center in India. The phone number that will show up on your caller id is 251-747-4572. This call center is doing a very poor job and it appears the main goal of them is to delete the listing. They do not identify themselves in most cases and will ask you two questions:
1. What is your address?.
2. Does your business have a storefront?.
When you answer the first question be sure to give the address EXACTLY as listed in your Google Places account. If you do not provide the exact address this call center will flag your account and your listing will disappear with a few days.
The second question is really the gotcha question they are using to delete most accounts. No matter what type of business you have I am telling all of my seo clients to just answer yes because if you fail to answer correctly or try to explain that you are a service business and you come to the customers home the person on the other end of the line seems to only understand yes or no and anything other then a yes answer results in a flag and again your listing will disappear in a few days.
Now Google is getting tons of complaints about this service and they may switch companies or clamp down on them but for now it appears that Google does not care and I do not expect them to correct this problem anytime soon. It is my belief that most of the changes that have occurred with Google in the last 6 months or so is directly related to them almost missing their quarterly earnings estimates and they are trying to push more small business onto Adwords instead of the free traffic. If this trend continues I expect Google Places to switch a percentage of positions within Google Places to paid positions and this will make the competition even worse for the free listings.
Just got called. The number was a 650 area code.
The number I got the call from was (650) 253-2000
All they said was “do you bring carpet to your address to clean.”
Yep, happened to me. All my Google Place listings for GA gone. I did not get a phone call? I had to re-list them all.
Due to the onslaught of complaints Google is getting they have now added phone support Monday Thru Friday 6am to 5pm pst. If you click on “my listing has incorrect information” it will at the very end of the process give you the option for a phone call. This is helpful with some problems but the bigger issues like your listing being gone this does nothing because you cannot get to the link for the incorrect information at all. I have been posting about this on the Google Forum to try and get the issued resolved but no luck so far.
If your listing is gone or coming up as “we do not serve that location” then the best recourse is to file a request for help stating in as much detail as possible about the issue and also post about it on the Google forum. Then once they respond then contact them via the phone to get the process resolved quicker. If you call before they respond lots of the complaints say they just tell you they are looking into it. Posting in the public forum I think helps because Google is trying to give the appearance that this is a minor number of sites when in fact it is huge and they do not want that to get out so they tend to work quicker with the publicly stated complaints.
I have gone that root, it did me no good. I must have had an idot. They just made things worse. So I decided to start over and make sure everything is by Googles guidelines and have a different phone number for each listing. Also in the future you should have a different website for each google place listing as well.
Your method will work but it is not as simple as you state. First of all if your listing is gone because Google made an error which happens all the time there is a high probability that over time they will fix the issue that caused this and then you will have multiple Google Places Pages for the same area/domain which can cause a whole new slew of problems and also if you have done any seo work to your places page all that work is voided because the encoded url will not be exactly the same.
The other issue you mentioned about having a unique website for each places listing that is the ideal way but most everyone gets the execution wrong. See Google is very good at tracking and this means for example let’s say you buy a brand new computer today and get a new internet connection to you home so you are starting with a clean slate. You buy a new domain and create a website then you decide to create a Google places page and once that is done and working you decide you want to target another area nearby so you decide to make a new website, use a new domain, and create a new places page for the new area. The problem is every computer that has ever logged into your first places page is marked by Google via ip address so in order to avoid Google from knowing your the same you need to change your ip address and most people do not follow this step plus to make matters worse if you buy a list of ip addresses and do not understand the process you could be getting an ip address for Chicago when your business is in Seattle so when you create the new listing with the ip from Chicago you are setting up red flags and this will result in issues with your ranking on Google. To make matters even worse you have to remember every time you login which ip is used for which places page and keep it all straight.
If that is not enough in order to really pull the multiple listings off correctly you should have each domain registered with a different name, that is also showing a local address that matches the one used on your places page and each one should be hosted on a different class c-ip hosting account
On top of all of this you need to make sure that all of the image files, video files, text, etc clear copyscape as being unique.
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