Recently I was helping one of my customers claim their Google Places listing. This involves verifying that you are a business owner or an authorised representative of the listing. How does any business end up in G00gle Places in the first place? Well, although this article is about the big G making mistakes, one of many brilliant things they do is attract businesses to use their platform which helped them become the number one search engine in the world by far.
In G00gle’s own words “97% of consumers search for local businesses online.”
Going back to the issues that they are currently experiencing, this particular client’s Places page had a status of ‘pending, being reviewed’. Since we done everything right and verified to be legit owners of this listing, I queried their Places team and got following response:
Hello,
Thank you for contacting Google. Your business listing has been verified and is displaying appropriately: http://plus.google.com/xxxxxxxxxxxxx/about?gl=AU&hl=en-AUYou’re seeing this pending message due to a technical error when your listings are in fact live on Google Maps.Please continue to make updates to your listings with some regularity (even if you just Edit and Submit the listing without changing any information) to ensure that your listing information is sent to Google Maps and to potentially trigger a status update within your dashboard.
I wonder if this anything to do with recently widely reported issues with search engine results page (SERP) results where many of the webmasters are seeing wild changes to rankings that to date G00gle is denying are part of any significant change to their algorithm?
And sadly for this client of mine, as much as Google Places support message that everything is fine with the listing, they are not showing up on the first page results any more – I however hope that this is going to change!
I’ve noticed lots of strange behavior from Google Places recently. All of the listings in my account changed to Pending – Being Reviewed recently. Within the last three weeks, the number of impressions for all of my listings has dramatically decreased. Has anyone else had this experience recently? I’d be interested to know what’s going on.
Hey Richard, Google is not making it easier. I think that they treat local places and organic search as a constant beta program whereas their bread and butter AdWords is a lot more reliable.
ps. My client’s places page has been activated but they’ve fallen from the face of the earth for the competitive keyword they used to rank. See the article I just wrote on SERP changes https://www.dariopetkovic.com/substantial-change-to-google-serp-rankings/