It would appear that Google’s Local Business Centre is causing business owners around the world one or two headaches now that it’s started to combine listings and display incorrect results.

The issue appears to be that when company A and company B have a similar address they are being merged into one record, often with the business name for company A being displayed with the address for company B and the URL for A linking to B and so on.

I first noticed this when checking out the rankings for a number of our sites – from our office address in Manchester we have a listing for our Manchester Design Agency, Bluetooth advertising and email marketing services.

When performing a search for Bluetooth marketing I got the following results:
 

Whilst the address, URL displayed and link are all correct, the results are displaying the title tag for LiveWire Campaign, our email marketing tool.  This is obviously a concern for us and we would like to see this issue resolved, however, fortunately I suppose the title tag is not displaying the name of one of our competitors, or worse displaying our title tag and linking through to a competitor, as these guys have found:

http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/hotels-in-ripon-google-local-mixup.html

The major issue here is that there doesn’t seem to be much you can do about it, other than remove your listing.  From browsing the Google forums it would seem there are many people suffering from this issue:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/maps/thread?tid=6c515a66e1584e5e&hl=en

From working with Google Local Business in the past and subscribing to their group, it’s clear that it’s a service that is occasionally dealt with by their representatives who offer advice but it doesn’t appear to be a service that gets that much full time focus from them – which is a shame as it’s an extremely useful service that offers good ranking opportunities within local search, it's reputation will also be somewhat tainted if this issues persists for much longer.

Hopefully this issue will be resolved shortly, but in the mean time it’d be interesting to here from anyone who has suffered a drop in traffic levels and subsequently business as a result of this error.