A Listing Edited by Somebody Else

Your listing is not only yours

An uncomfortable fact that most owners discover accidentally.

Members of the public can suggest changes to a business listing: hours, address, phone number, whether it is permanently closed, and more.

Those suggestions are assessed and, if they appear credible, applied, sometimes without the owner being asked.

Separately, automated systems update listings from other information found about a business, which happens with no human involvement at all.

So a listing can be accurate on Monday and wrong on Thursday with nobody at the business having touched it.

Who changes things, and why

Rarely malice, which is worth knowing before assuming a competitor.

A customer who arrived and found you closed suggests the hours are wrong, and they were right for that day and wrong in general.

Somebody who visited an address you left suggests you have moved or closed.

A well-meaning regular corrects a detail using information that is out of date.

And automated updates pull from other sources: directories, your own website, and information published elsewhere, which is why an old entry somewhere can rewrite a current listing.

Deliberate interference by a competitor happens and is much less common than the innocent versions.

What gets changed most

• Opening hours, by a distance.
• Permanently closed, which is the damaging one.
• The phone number.
• The address or map pin.
• Categories.
• The business name, occasionally.

The second is the one to check for specifically. A listing marked permanently closed removes you from consideration entirely, and businesses have gone weeks without noticing.

The permanently closed problem

Worth separating because it is the most damaging single thing that can happen here.

A business shown as permanently closed loses its local visibility almost immediately, and the effect is total rather than gradual.

It can arise from a suggestion by somebody who found you shut, from a period of genuine closure that was never reversed, or from automated inference where signals suggested you had stopped trading.

The correction is to change the status back and, where possible, to strengthen the signals saying otherwise: current hours, recent posts, recent photographs, and recent reviews.

A listing with activity from this week is considerably less likely to be inferred as closed than one nobody has touched since 2019.

A worked example

A shop noticed a quiet fortnight and could not account for it.

Checking their listing signed out showed their Sunday hours had been changed to closed, which had been true during a refurbishment eighteen months earlier and had not been true since.

Somebody had suggested the correction at the time and it had been applied, and nobody at the business had looked at the listing from outside in over a year.

They corrected the hours, then set every special hours date for the coming twelve months while they were there.

Sunday trade recovered over the following weeks.

Their estimate of what the error had cost was uncomfortable, and the check that would have caught it takes two minutes.

How to notice

Three routes, and none is fully reliable on its own.

Notifications sometimes arrive when a change is applied, and they are inconsistent enough that they cannot be relied on.

Looking at the live listing signed out, monthly, which is the practical method and takes two minutes.

And noticing an unexplained change in enquiries, which is how most businesses actually find out and is far too late.

Make the monthly signed-out check a habit attached to something else you already do, since a standalone reminder will be ignored within a quarter.

Correcting it properly

The change itself is straightforward and it frequently does not hold, which is the real problem.

Change the value back, then look for what is asserting the wrong one.

If your website shows different hours from your listing, that inconsistency invites the automated correction to happen again.

The same applies to old directory entries, a supplier's stockist page, or a social profile with stale information.

Making every source agree is what makes a correction permanent, and it is why the same wrong value keeps coming back for businesses that only ever fix the listing.

Keeping it stable

Prevention, which is mostly about giving the system better information than whoever is suggesting otherwise.

Keep hours current, including special hours, so a closure on a holiday does not read as a general error.

Post and add photographs regularly, which signals an operating business.

Keep your details identical everywhere they appear.

And have more than one person with access, so a wrong value can be corrected while somebody is on holiday.

A well-maintained listing is edited by outsiders far less often than a neglected one, because there is less that looks wrong.

When it is a competitor

Uncommon, and worth knowing how to handle when it does happen.

The pattern is recognisable: repeated edits to the same field, changes that would specifically disadvantage you such as a wrong phone number or a closure status, and a frequency no honest correction would have.

Correct it each time, keep a dated record of every occurrence with screenshots, and use the reporting routes available rather than trying to out-edit the person.

Do not respond in kind, which achieves nothing and puts your own listing at risk of enforcement.

Where it persists, the record you have kept is what makes escalation possible, and it is the reason to write down every change rather than simply fixing each one.

The counter-case

The ability for others to suggest changes is not purely a nuisance.

It is also how a genuinely wrong listing gets fixed for customers when a business has stopped maintaining it, and how a closed business stops sending people to an empty building.

Plenty of suggested edits are correct, and reflexively reverting everything means occasionally reinstating an error a customer took the trouble to report.

There is also a limit to how much attention this deserves. A monthly two-minute check is proportionate; watching the listing daily is not, and most businesses will find nothing wrong most months.

Check when you check, correct at the source, and treat a suggested edit as information rather than as an attack.

The routine

1. Check the live listing signed out, monthly.
2. Look specifically for permanently closed.
3. Verify hours including Sundays and holidays.
4. Correct the value, then find its source.
5. Make every other source agree.
6. Post something so the listing looks active.
7. Attach the check to something you already do.

Step two takes ten seconds and is the one with the largest downside if skipped.

Public contributions generally are covered in questions and answers nobody monitors.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.