Google Places is a service that every business should sign up to, however Google’s policies at the moment mean you have to take care with how you use the listing.
At present Google are enforcing their listing rules in unpredictable ways and we’re hearing businesses are having their accounts suspended for what appears to a misreading on Google’s part of their own policies.
More importantly, there are stories of businesses who have updated their details and found their listing goes into “pending” status and their page is pulled from local search results until their revisions are reviewed by a Google staffer.
Often when the review is done, the listing is denied as being in breach of the rules which effectively bans the business from Google Places until the error is fixed.
Fixing the problem is difficult as the Google rejection emails are cryptic and, unfortunately in this era of the social business, come from a “no-reply” account with no sign off name, so there’s no way to find out exactly where the problem lies.
Given the uncertainty around Google’s policies in this space, it’s best not to make any changes to your Google Places account unless it’s absolutely necessary to update essential information.
If you haven’t already listed your business on Google Places, we’d still urge you to do so. Just make sure you get all of your details correct and pictures uploaded before you submit the entry.
Hi Paul,
I have found that with the “moving target” google is presenting to businesses, it is paralyzing them from doing exactly what google wants, which is updating and providing fresh content on their listings pages. I guess that’s why we have to spend so much time researching to keep clients out of trouble. Unfortunately, many that try to manage their place pages on their own find this out the hard way.
Well let me strut around here a bit … you see I am OUT of GooglePlaces’ Pending Purgatory so I am feeling pretty smug. This comes after too many miserable months following my accounts (which had been happily on view ever since Google started the Business Pages)being deactivated for no apparent reason. Several attempts to reactivate and resubmit. Waiting, waiting for a pin number for Google to come – sometimes to no avail, othertimes many weeks after the request and sometimes with a pin number that wasn’t accepted!
Oh dear. Cursed with this interesting sequence of events I have unfortunately had to reconsider promoting Google Places as heavily as I had in the past. I love good products that clients can use for no cost to promote their business online. This was perhaps my favourite. Now… it is a bit more like buying a lottery ticket. Why not have a go? But don’t depend on it.
And that is the real lesson of which we should never lose sight. If we want control over what we present on the web, then we need to make sure that we have our own online properties doing the very best job possible.
Nurture your website.
It really isn’t out of fashion.