Don’t Trust Results in Google MapMaker

An auto dealer client’s GMB page was showing up in Google with a different domain (the car maker’s – Ford.com) attached to it only for certain queries. I started looking through all of the usual data suspects to see if the errant domain was connected to any of the dealer’s business listings and came up empty. Then I searched Google Mapmaker for the client’s business name to see if it had the domain perhaps on a dupe listing. It returned only one result:

Nothing to see here, right? I was about to close out of MapMaker when I noticed something odd out of the corner of my eye in the map window:

Despite there being only one result for the query, there were three locations plotted on the map.

Upon further investigation, one of them had Ford.com listed as its website which was the likely cause of our client’s SERP problem. If I hadn’t noticed those map pins, I would never have found this problem.

The moral of the story – don’t trust the results in Google MapMaker.