Look how old this is!
I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 10 years 3 months ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.

In March of 2015 factual reversed themselves – You can update or add your business here which makes this post obsolete:

Some time over the past few days, there was a change in the policy at Factual so that business owners are no longer able to correct their own business details, and instead must work ONLY through a “Trusted Data Contributor”.

Factual is one of the four main feeders into the  local search ecosystem and it’s one of the first four places we go…  I’m not sure when the change took place, but as recently as two weeks ago it could still be done via email, so it had to be recent…

This is what it said on this page until recently…

UPDATE YOUR BUSINESS’S DETAILS

If you have already found your business in our Global Places data and have updates, email [email protected] with all of the details (for the fields listed above) that you wish to correct, along with the Factual Id of your business. Inclusion of your business’s Factual Id will expedite your request.

but now the page reads differently…

Contributing & Fixing Data

There are two ways to make explicit contributions or edits to Factual’s data:

1. Via the Factual Write API (for developers): using developer tools to make programmatic contributions, usually at a very large scale
2. Via our Trusted Data Contributors (for brands, business owners, and everyone else): working with online business listing management services to manage a moderate number of specific listings or brands

Following that link to the Trusted Data Contributors shows 13 different providers, one of which is Moz who we’ve been using lately, but Factual doesn’t seem to be playing nicely over there. 

What’s taking so long, Factual?

If you actually TRUST your “Trusted data providers”,  then why not update for them in a timely fashion?

For one client, for example, we used Moz and have been waiting over three months now, even Moz shows expected  June 6th, but you two months later its still not current.

This isn’t the trusted data providers fault,  Factual, it’s yours, and for a client to see this would be embarrassing, and looks as if we’ve not done our job!

We were actually doing better with Factual when we were on our own , and fixing incorrect data with Factual by email was an easy process.   I miss that, and even mentioned it in a recent local search presentation that  I gave in Tigard…. Why did you take that away, Factual?

I’ve updated my citation priority list to reflect the change in Factuals policy, but does anyone know when this factual policy changed, or found a “trusted provider” that Factual actually trusts?

If you like what you've seen here, would you please share this?

•