Anyone can edit a business listings details on Google Maps and local. So if you have a competitor and you want to close them down, or shut their business hours, or change their web site address or worse, you can do that. The business owner may notice an email about the change, only after the change was implemented. Then they need to go in and update their listing and wait days for Google to update it in the search results.

This is a major issue and to be honest, I shy away from covering it, because people target my business whenever I cover Google Maps hacks or exploits. Heck, my own business has it’s business closed, hours changed, even our web site URL point elsewhere – because SEOs are awesome I guess? I mean, at least leave a positive review if you are going to mess with my Google Local listing please?

And I am not alone, it happens all the time and local SEOs and business owners are super upset about it. In fact, we all want a way to disable people from making edits to our local listings if the local listing is verified and managed in a Google My Business account. Just disallow third party updates and if you won’t do that, at least before you push those changes live, send out notices to the business and give them 2 weeks time to reply?

These edits can result in the listing completely disappearing from the search results and thus impacting the business in a major way.

I really do agree – this is a bad thing that so many people take advantage of in a bad bad way.