Here are the full details so that you can sure
yourself
Here
are the full details so that you can sure yourself
"Merchants
are notified by email"
- Google just started notifying users by email last month. Their statement makes it sound like this has been going on for ages. Before September 2017, there were no emails going to people about edits made to their listings.
- Not everyone gets an email about edits that have been made. To test this, I had several people submit an update to a listing I own to change the phone number. When the edit went live, the Google account that was the primary owner on the listing got an email; the Google account that was a manager on the listing did not.
Similarly, I am a manager on over 50
listings and 7 of them currently show as having updates in the Google My
Business dashboard. I haven’t received a single email since they launched this
feature a month ago.
"Notified
[...] when edits are suggested"
Merchants are not notified
when edits are "suggested." Any
time I've ever heard of an email notification in the last month, it went out
after the edit was already live.
Here's a recent case on the Google My Business forum. This
business owner got an email when his name was updated because the edit was
already live. He currently has a pending edit on his listing to change the
hours of operation. Clearly this guy is on top of things, so why hasn’t he
denied it? Because he wouldn’t even know about it since it’s pending.
The
edit isn’t live yet, so he’s not receiving a notification — either by email or
inside the Google My Business dashboard.
Edits show up in the Google My Business dashboard as "Updates from Google." Many people think that if they don’t "accept" these edits in the Google My Business dashboard, the edits won’t go live. The reality is that by "accepting" them, you’re just confirming something that’s already live on Google. If you "don’t accept," you actually need to edit the listing to revert it back (there is no "deny" button).
Edits show up in the Google My Business dashboard as "Updates from Google." Many people think that if they don’t "accept" these edits in the Google My Business dashboard, the edits won’t go live. The reality is that by "accepting" them, you’re just confirming something that’s already live on Google. If you "don’t accept," you actually need to edit the listing to revert it back (there is no "deny" button).
Here's another current example of a
listing I manage inside Google My Business. The dashboard doesn’t show any
updates to the website field, yet there's a pending edit that I can see on the
Google Maps app. A user has suggested that the proper website is a different
page on the website than what I currently have. The only way to see all types
of pending edits is via Check
the Facts on Google Maps. No business owner I've ever spoken to has any
clue what this is, so I think it’s safe to say they wouldn’t be checking there.
Here's how I would edit that
original response from Google to make it more factually correct:
Merchants who manage their business listing info through
Google My Business (which is free to use) are notified when edits made by
others are published on Google. Sometimes they are notified by email and the
updates are also shown inside the Google My Business dashboard. Google allows
users (other than the business owner) to make edits to listings on Google, but
the edits are reviewed by either automated systems or, in some cases, actual
human beings. Although the system isn’t perfect, Google is continually making
efforts to keep the map free from spam and malicious editing.
