Kind of an odd issue I am dealing with, that I haven't come across before.
Currently working for a former neighbor who is attempting to reclaim her deceased husband's business name from a damaged / closed state where web listings are concerned. It is sort of a complex issue.
Her husband used to operate several small businesses run under one Enterprise label. He sold one of those businesses to an acquaintance and the purchaser was requested to change the name of the business he purchased. But, he never changed the business name and subsequently ran that business into the ground fairly quickly, somewhat tainting the Enterprise's reputation a little, and leaving muddy footprints all over the web for the business he acquired from the base Enterprise.
Now, a couple years later, this lady is flat broke and decides to start up that particular business again, demanding to keep it under their former business name, because she has a sentimental attachment to the name, given it was her deceased husband's baby and it is an unusual business name for this area. I suspected the reputation and old footprint issues might be a problem going in and I asked her to consider changing the name, but she was insistent on keeping it.
When she and her husband ran that business it had a very good reputation and over the past couple of months it has regained some standing in the community, but those muddy footprints on the web are causing some issues, especially where it comes to potential customers contacting the new business numbers and the process of cleaning up the muddy footprints of when the business failed under someone else's ownership.
I'd imagine whoever currently has the phone number of the failed business listing, is probably none too happy right now.
I've already got SEO down pretty good and her new site is at the top of search engine listings on all but Yahoo, in a very short time, but the White Pages, Yellow Pages and business listings are a real pain to try to deal with when it comes to modifying listings for a pre-existing business with the same name that has since failed/closed. On Yahoo especially, the old muddy Whitepages.com listing is on the very top and her new business site is listed second to it, which is really bugging the living daylights out of me. :-)
She is still virtually broke and can't afford Yext and other listing providers' fees to update all those listings. I'm still slowly working on updating local business listings on various portals that will permit it, but I imagine those changes will take some time to update, since they aren't paid updates.
I guess (aside from venting) I am curious about the opinions of others about the timetable I might be looking at for those YP and WP web listings to update organically from filtering up through other sources like local phone book listings, search engine results, etc., because I normally set up a client's web-presence from a blank slate, which is simple, compared to handling this mess. Or, will these old listings even update organically from the, "wait a while" method?