How to Tell How a Google Local Listing Became Unverified

Another Google MapMaker Regional Lead was talking with me about a page for a business that recently came unverified and vanished from the search results.

You can see that the Google+ page is unverified because it lost its verified checkmark and just left a G+ page but it’s not connected to Maps so it won’t rank in the 3-pack.

Since this was a recent change I have the advantage of using Google’s cache to see what happened. Here’s the steps I took:

• Search the URL on Google for the G+ page (https://plus.google.com/+KingDavidPizzaVaughan)
• Hit the drop-down arrow beside it that says “cached”
• This will bring up a blank-looking page. Right-click and hit “view page source”
• Press CTRL+F and search for CID. It will be a long string of numbers and you want what comes in between the %3D and %
  
• Insert the CID into the MapMaker URL format and you’ll end up with http://www.google.com/mapmaker?gw=90&cid=6356679680116645113
• In MapMaker it will show you that this feature got deleted because someone marked it as a duplicate of another listing.
  
• In order to be able to click on anything you must be logged in to Google. If I click on “view original” you can see the listing that it was marked a duplicate of.

As Linda Buquet pointed out on the forum, these are 2 different businesses. King David Laffa & Grill has a different phone number, a different website and, most importantly, a separate entrance that you can see on Street View.

Looks like someone messed up here! Never a dull moment in the Local SEO world.