Editing a Listing From Search Results

An edit is a request

The most useful thing to understand about the new arrangement, and it is not obvious from the interface.

When you change something on your listing, you are not editing a record you own in the way you edit a page on your own website.

You are submitting a change to a system that will assess it, and which may accept it, reject it, delay it, or accept it now and reverse it later.

Most edits go through without any of that being visible, which is why the ones that do not are so confusing.

Why anything is reviewed at all

Worth understanding, because it explains which edits behave oddly.

The listing is public information about a business, and the system is guarding against changes that would make it wrong: a name that adds keywords, an address that does not exist, a category that does not match the business, hours that look implausible.

That checking is largely automated, with some proportion looked at by a person.

So an edit that looks routine to you may resemble, to an automated check, a pattern it has been trained to be suspicious of.

None of that is personal, and none of it is explained to you when it happens.

The edits that get looked at hardest

• The business name, which is the most scrutinised field.
• The address, particularly any change to it.
• The primary category.
• The phone number.
• Anything changed shortly after something else.

The last is the one businesses trip over. Several changes to core fields in quick succession look like an account being taken over, and can trigger review of the whole listing rather than of one edit.

Rejections are usually silent

The behaviour that causes most of the frustration.

An edit that is not accepted frequently just does not appear, with no message, no notification, and no explanation.

The dashboard may even show your version while the public listing shows the old one, which is why checking from inside is not a check at all.

Which means the only reliable verification is looking at the live listing while signed out, in a private window, a few days after making the change.

Businesses that assume an edit took, and discover months later that it did not, are usually the ones that only ever looked from their own signed-in account.

Edits that revert

A separate and stranger behaviour worth knowing about.

An edit can be accepted, appear correctly for a period, and then revert to a previous value.

That usually means something else asserted a different value: a data source elsewhere, an automated update, or a suggestion from the public that was accepted.

The remedy is not to make the edit again and again, which achieves nothing, but to find and correct whatever is asserting the other value.

Frequently that is an old directory listing, an out-of-date entry with a supplier, or your own website carrying different details from the ones you are trying to set.

A worked example

A business changed their hours, their primary category, and their description in one sitting.

The hours took effect. The category did not, and the description appeared and then reverted about a fortnight later.

Nothing had notified them of any of this, and from inside their own account everything looked correct.

They checked the live listing signed out, found the discrepancy, and made one change at a time with several days between each.

The category went through on the second attempt. The description reverted again, which led them to the actual cause: an old directory entry with different wording that a data feed was reasserting.

Correcting that entry fixed the listing permanently.

The edits had never been the problem, and three weeks had been spent resubmitting them.

Make changes one at a time

The practice that avoids most of this.

Change one field, wait several days, confirm it is live from a signed-out view, and then change the next.

That is slower and it means that when something does not take, you know exactly which change was refused.

It also avoids the pattern of several core-field changes in a short period, which is itself a trigger for closer scrutiny.

Batch the harmless things freely: photographs, posts, services, and attributes rarely cause difficulty and can be done together.

Reserve the one-at-a-time discipline for name, address, category, and phone number.

Keep a record of what you changed

An unglamorous habit that saves a great deal of confusion later.

Note the date, what was changed, and what it was changed from, in whatever you already use.

That turns did somebody change the hours into a question with an answer, particularly where more than one person has access.

It also lets you tell the difference between an edit that reverted and an edit somebody else made, which look identical from outside.

Four lines in a shared document is sufficient, and it takes ten seconds per change.

The counter-case

None of this should suggest the system is capricious or that editing is fraught.

The overwhelming majority of edits go through within a day or two and stay, and most businesses will never notice any of the behaviours described here.

The review process also exists for a reason, and it is what stops competitors and spammers rewriting listings freely, which is a considerably worse problem than an occasional delayed edit.

There is also a risk in over-checking: looking at the listing daily and reacting to every apparent difference produces anxiety rather than accuracy, since some variation is display-related rather than real.

Change it, check it a few days later signed out, and otherwise leave it alone.

The routine

1. Change one core field at a time.
2. Wait several days before the next.
3. Check the live listing signed out.
4. Do not resubmit a refused edit repeatedly.
5. Look for what asserts the reverted value.
6. Batch photographs and posts freely.
7. Note the date of every change you make.

Step three is the whole article, and it is the step almost nobody takes because the dashboard already showed the change.

Finding the controls is covered in managing your listing without the old dashboard.

Frequently asked questions

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