One of my clients recently moved premises and asked me to update their address details in various Internet directories. He had quite a good search engine ranking, so I wanted to run a few tests before I made the change. One test was to see what Google Local does when an address is updated.

For those that don't know, Google Local is a searchable directory of local businesses which incorporates Google Maps to make finding local businesses easier. Google also integrates Google Local results above it's normal search results if the search terms contain a town, city or region, as shown in the example below. The search terms used were web design nuneaton.

I used this website (shoredutton.co.uk) as the "guinea pig" for the experiment by adding an extra line to the address (Warwickshire), so instead of reading:

Shore Dutton Internet Consultancy
46 Bermuda Road
Nuneaton
CV10 7HP

it now read:

Shore Dutton Internet Consultancy
46 Bermuda Road
Nuneaton
Warwickshire
CV10 7HP

When a change to the business name or address is made in Google Local, they send out a postcard to the address containing a PIN code for confirmation. It took about a week to arrive and when it did (this morning), I confirmed the changes. This afternoon, my website has dropped from the top three or four results in Google Local to fiftieth (50th) position - a major blow. Fortunately, most of my work comes from word-of-mouth rather than Google Local but it's still quite scary to see the effect it has had.

Now, it may be too soon to comment on this and i'm hoping that the drastic change is only temporary, however if a business depended on getting customers through Google Local, it could be very damaging - even if it was just for a day or so.

I will update this post if the results change in the next few days, but if it doesn't change back I think I will be advising my client to create a new listing for their new business premises rather than updating the existing one and then delete the old one once the new one reaches a sufficient ranking.