I have noticed that a mall in my area was hijacked and renamed to Lindt, it is clear from majority of the reviews and photo’s being about the mall and not the chocolate store necessarily.
Additionally the one store has over 4,800 reviews, while the mall itself only has 3,000 reviews.
I have tried multiple times to rename or mark the store as a duplicate, because the mall was recreated as a result of this, however it has always been rejected.
Thanks for reaching out. I looked very briefly at the two places and noticed that the naming currently looks OK. I see the English names. The first few reviews on each also seems to be about the correct shop / shopping center.
So I’m not sure I understand the problem. Please elaborate on what the problem is.
For now I think it would be incorrect to try to merge them as duplicates.
So the issue is that originally the Lindt store, is the old Woodlands Mall pin/location. At some point, someone renamed the Woodlands Mall to be Lindt, this made all the reviews and photos that originally belonged to the old Mall pin, now look like they belonged to the Lindt store
For instance the Lindt store from any review around 1+ years ago talks about the mall:
This causes, any visits to the Woodlands Mall to always appear as visits to just this specific store.
So it’s not really that it is a duplicate, it is just that someone hijacked the original mall pin and renamed it to Lindt, and now people will get notifications to rate their visit to Lindt, and not the mall as usual.
And at some point a new Mall pin was created, as the original had been hijacked.
I’m not sure if there is a way to reset it back to Woodlands Boulevard, as majority of the reviews and pictures actually related to the mall.
Very well explained. I think I understand the problem now. It is a very tough challenge you have on your hands.
Merging the chocolate shop into the shopping center now would be a wrong move because the genuine chocolate reviews would then also move onto the shopping center. And the chocolate shop would have to start all over as a new shop with zero reviews.
Unfortunately, there are no tools available for local guides to move reviews from one pin to another. All we can do is to flag individual reviews. Before moving forward it would be nice to estimate how many of the 4800 reviews are actually about chocolate and how many are about the shopping center.
Let’s say there are “only” 100 about chocolate and 4700 about the shopping center. Considering that the initial mistake (intentional or unintentional) was done by the chocolate shop owner, then I would think we should flag the 100 reviews, rename and re-categorize the chocolate shop into a shopping center. And then merge the two. That leaves a very unfortunate situation for the Chocolate shop owner who then have to start all over on Google Maps. But he/she initially made a mistake.
This could prove time-consuming and difficult since the pins are claimed.
In case the 4800 reviews are split with 100 old shopping center reviews and 4700 are newer reviews about chocolate, then we should probably just flag the 100 old shopping center reviews. And move on.
Depending on split you could also choose to forget about it. I feel that the tools given to local guides are not nearly powerful enough to fix a problem of this complexity. Without or with the collaboration of the business owners this is a problem that could take weeks to solve if no reviews can be sacrificed. Or in fact, it could be impossible to solve it.
An alternative solution would be to hope the Google Maps Team finds this so alarming and unfair and they have some secret tools to solve it in a better way. But I doubt that is the case.
I’m tagging @Flash as a very experienced connect moderator and hoping he can help you out.
Thanks a lot for reporting this to us. Please be aware we’re working on correcting the informaiton about the shopping center.
I’ve redacted your post to remove the website, as it could be considered as advertising. Even though it’s not intentional, this is something we can’ allow on Connect. Thanks for the additional information.
