My Google Maps listing tanked after I changed my business hours

I updated my hours for my cleaning company in Portland last month and my calls dropped by 40% overnight. Turns out Google penalized me for having inconsistent hours across my website and profile. Did anyone else lose rankings after making a simple edit like that?

4 comments

4 Comments

amy_west1mo ago

Turns out Google penalized me for having inconsistent hours" - that's the key right there. But here's the thing nobody's talking about: Google probably didn't penalize you for changing the hours, it flagged you for the mismatch between your site and your profile. I've seen this happen with a bunch of local businesses in my neighborhood. What worked for one guy was adding the same hours to his Google Posts and making sure his citation sites like Yelp matched too. Google seems to want total consistency across the entire web, not just two places. So your real issue might be cleaning up all those other directories before Google re-scans them.

the_christopher1mo ago

Nah @amy_west I gotta push back on that a little. I think people overthink this whole consistency thing way too much. Google is way smarter than just scanning directories and flagging mismatches. I've run a business with different hours on Yelp vs Google for months and never got dinged. The real issue is probably how quickly you changed them and if you updated your Google Business Profile properly with the right effective date. If you just flipped them overnight without giving Google a heads up through the proper update process, that's what triggered the flag, not some minor mismatch on a third party site nobody uses anymore. Plus half those citation sites like Foursquare or whatever are basically dead and Google knows that. They are not cross referencing every single directory on the internet for small businesses. That would be insane and they would have to penalize basically everyone.

annajenkins1mo ago

What if the real issue was Google counting a flag against the wrong category and mixing up your actual NAP data?

drew_jones311mo ago

Yeah but @the_christopher, I think Google does check some of those directories still, even the dead ones. I've had this exact same thing happen to me last year with my shop's hours. What fixed it for me was going through Moz Local and manually updating every single citation site they found. Took a weekend but it worked. The mismatch that got me flagged was actually on some random aggregator site I forgot existed, not Yelp. So you're both kind of right - Google doesn't scan everything all the time, but when they do scan and find a conflict, that's when you get the penalty. Amy's suggestion about adding the hours to Google Posts is smart too, I did that and it seemed to help speed up the re-scan. Bottom line is you gotta be consistent everywhere, not just the big places, and set your effective date properly in the dashboard.