Competitors can report but they will have no influence over whether an account get suspended. That is a human decision by a Googler. They perceived that you violated their guidelines on a number of listings not just one. Without spending some time looking at the listings and analyzing what you did and are doing, I can’t know why they were suspended.

There is no way to reopen a suspended account. Google’s advice is corret. That feature is broken. So the only choice is to open new accounts.

Google+ Pages and the merge are still very buggy. I still recommend that most businesses ONLY claim in Places and live with the many quirks and problems that the dashboard has. Not all but most.

I am hesitant to provide advice as I don’t know every thing there is to know about the listings and this forum is not a way for that to happen.

Can your competitors report your listings and get them suspended even if what they report (e.g. closed, moved, etc) is not true?

The only thing I can think of is that I had the option “Yes, this business serves customers at their locations:” checked with a radius, but did not select “Do not show my business address on my Maps listing”. The nature of the business is legal and they do both. They have a physical store front and go to clients if necessary. There was an email before the account was suspended noting a change in TOS where you have to check the “Do not show” if you don’t have a store front. We did not check it because they do have a physical store front where they meet customers. Otherwise, there was nothing out of line with their TOS.

Would we be better off removing the claimed listings form the Google places admin altogether and just claiming them via the Google Pages claim process?

Thanks for your help.

Bryan

I hope all is well.

I have two quick questions for you:

1. Do you know if the rel=author image markup will work with Google+ pages or do you have to use a personal Google+ profile for it to show the author image?

2. I have a client who claimed their Google+ pages and their Google Places listings. However if you view both in a browser, they have different “storeids”. Is this a problem? Will Google merge these? Also the claimed places listing is 100% complete in the Google places admin, but is not showing any of the rich features like images and videos. Do you have any idea why this may be happening?

There is even a different “storeid” when you click edit in Google Places admin vs when you click “View my listing”

Shouldn’t these all match?!

Google recently “suspended” the places admin for the listings without warning or reason. The listings rankings dropped off the map. The account was in compliance with terms of service. Sense then I have claimed them in a new places admin, but it hasn’t solved the problem and now it appears that the listings are even more fragmented. Any advice here would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Bryan

You can see that the other scores do indeed show up on pages linked with Google+ authorship.

I made a G+ (business and personal), then linked together all articles and some individual services pages to the personal G+ page.

After a few days, the clients image started showing up in the serps, then I added his homepage in the mix just to see what would happen. For regular organic searches his homepage shows up without a pic, BUT, in local results you see his pic with the homepage Totally awesome start to a Sunday workday.

How exactly did you set yours up?

Mike,

In theory, couldn’t a dentistry chain, dealership, Subway, etc (all possible franchaises) have one “face” to put in their individual locations search result? I.E.,
subway.com/tx/dallas
subway.com/tx/plano
subway.com/tx/richardson
?

It would take some elbow grease on subway sure, but in theory the individual store (per query, or other personalized search) would be able to show the corresponding GM/owners, pic in blended as long as their G+ account was linked?

Authorship is about the individual and his or her authority.

A business page is about place.

An individual needs to create their own page on Plus before they can create a business page on Google Plus.

It is the about page for this individual that the rel=author links to.