Why Your Driving Directions Might Be Wrong on Google Maps After You Move

I’ve heard this scenario come up quite a bit over at the Google and Your Business Forum: “My map on Google looks correct yet my customers are being routed to my old location when they get driving directions”.

There is definitely different advice being given online over what to do when your business moves. The MapMaker team would advise you to close the listing and open a new one. This is taken from this help article here which says:

Mark a location as closed or moved

• Find the closed or moved business on Google Maps.
• Click Report a Problem at the bottom of the Google Maps result.
• Click the “Place is permanently closed or doesn’t exist” button.
• Click “Yes” when it appears.
• If the place has moved to a new location, enter the new location’s information in the comment box.
• Click Submit.

On the other side, this help article tells you to just update the listing in the Google My Business dashboard:

If the business is moving, simply update the address of the business in the dashboard rather than deleting it. That way, you’ll save all of your reviews and
conversations with followers.

If you do the first option and mark your business as closed, you probably won’t have mapping issues or driving direction issues but will most likely experience your old location showing up as permanently closed when people search for your business. It will also weaken the ranking of the new location and you’ll have to contact support to manually move all your reviews over. To me, this is way more painful than wrong driving directions.

If you do the second option and just update the address in your dashboard, expect that your driving directions will be screwed up for a few weeks and contact Google My Business support and ask them to fix it for you (they can on the back end).

Why does this happen?

Gregg Gordon (AKA Flash) summed it up very well on this thread:

“The problem is that most people don’t realize that there is two different markers; I didn’t know myself until a Googler explained it.  One is where the place label goes, and it is the one you manipulate in Map Maker, Report a Problem and the GMB dashboard.  The other one is the one that directions uses.  They are split so you can have the place label in the middle of the building but the directions take you to the front door instead of the alley out back.