Understanding Different Google My Business Listing statuses

A lot has changed with Google My Business in recent years. Google announced multiple GMB policy changes and has started to crack down on Google My Business (GMB) spam.

These new changes are having a significant impact on business owners. While it might feel like Google is picking on you — they are not. Thus, it’s essential for you to check the status of your GMB listing regularly, so you can work towards correcting those if required.

Various Google My Business listing statuses

The video in this module goes over different statuses and how to check them. Knowing the status of your Google My Business listing is the most important thing – It is the first step towards determining whether the listing is ready for optimization.

There are a total of 14 different statuses. However, the five statuses to check regularly for are:

• Suspended, 
• Pending verification, 
• Pending review, 
• Duplicate location, and 
• Duplicate address.

A) Suspended 

The suspended status means Google has taken down the listing from search and cannot be accessed by anyone.  

B) Pending Verification 

Your Google My Business listing status can change to ‘pending verification’ If you make any changes to your business address, Google might consider this spam and take down your listing from public search and will ask you to re-verify.  

To fix this, you must request a verification code and submit your address.  Google will send a postcard to verify your business in around 5-12 business days. Once you get your code, it’s as simple as entering the code to complete the verification.  

C) Pending Review

Pending review is one of the most difficult statuses to get resolved.  This means that Google has flagged your listing for a major violation of their policies and has put you in the queue for a quality check. This may take 6-8 weeks or longer to resolve.

D) Duplicate Location

The duplicate location happens when a new listing is created for a business location that has already been verified. If GMB shows there are two listings for your company using the same location or address for both, that means you have a duplicate location issue. There could be multiple reasons for this:

• You worked with a marketing agency in the past that created a listing for you. You then created a new listing after you stopped working with the agency.
• You created a listing for your business in the past, completely forgot about it, and ended up creating a new listing that led to listing duplication.

To find duplicate listings for your business, go to maps.google.com and type in your business name, if you see two different listings then there is a duplicate listing.  

To solve this problem, contact GMB support to get the two listings merged into one.

E) Duplicate Address

Duplicate address issue arises when a location shares the same address as another location in your account, OR your business address is the same as another business’s address.

All you have to do to solve the issue is to change the address of one of your listings. Give the location a unique address or a unique store code. Use store codes for differentiating locations that have the same address.