This is a recent change.

Then, if you are using the Places dashboard, make custom categories for choices 2-5. If you are using the G+ Page management interface click go to the public view of the record and click on the public report a problem link and add custom categories to your listing. Remember that they need to meet the guideline of say what your business is, not what it does or sells…. ie insurance agency NOT insurance.

By ‘bot’ I mean a program that trolls the internet or MM records making auto-approved changes. Bots scrape websites and create new POIs, add categories, change all the MM records to make them consistent with specific guidelines or desired changes, merge dupes, revert changes, and the like. I think of it as a semi-autonomous program that has a specific purpose, and is ‘let loose’ on the web to do it’s virtually unsupervised thing. I’m not sure if the agent that adds categories or makes undocumented changes could be described as a bot or not (sometimes it’s a human agent), but it’s close enough. Since I can’t see the changes, I don’t know what changes they’re making, and what, if any effect it will have on the listing. (This has never been explained to me by a Googler.) I’m assuming that the record is reflecting changes in data that isn’t accessible from the MM interface (photos in the Dashboard or Place page, for example, are hidden from MM). I don’t know where the ‘bot’ gets the category changes from, and I don’t know why it adds this (usually) worthless information. If Google would actually work on creating a comprehensive system of categories that is easily understood by the layman (and disabled the category bot), this wouldn’t be an issue. I don’t know if the additional categories have any effect on ranking, although I assume that from Google’s standpoint it makes it easier to find in searches. I’m sorry I couldn’t be of any more help, as the process is as much a mystery to me as it is to you. I developed my category best practices to reduce the friction and hassle of handling data in MM (and Places), which is a barely functional UI for even experienced mappers. I guess I would question why Google would add categories that have nothing to do with the business, and why those ‘extra’ categories even need to be visible; if Google indexes the website and other listings already, it has a good idea what the business is, and how to get to it. It can do this with regular searches, but not Places searches? The whole process is too opaque, and if the idea is to keep everyone in the dark regarding how categories affect ranking, it really doesn’t work, because either people have too few or too many categories. For example, a change occurred, adding Construction to almost every Locksmith. Why? What does one have to do with the other? Not much. And yet there was a huge batch of Locksmiths that had Construction as one of their categories. No one is going to search for construction when they want a Locksmith. They’ll search for ‘lockouts’ ‘key replacement’, ‘key duplication’, ‘safe’ ‘safe & lock’, ‘locksmiths’, ‘locks’, etc. but not construction. How Google even mapped that category, or where it got that category from (since all the websites connected to the POIs I looked at didn’t really refer to construction) is a mystery. Presumably ‘they’ scraped the web and came across a treasure trove of the singular construction category (which doesn’t exist as a separate category in MM) and decided to add it. Beyond dumb, if you ask me. Why not just add Key Duplication Service and Safe & Vault Service to every Locksmith POI instead? It would be more useful and accurate than Construction, and they’re standard categories that apply to 99% of the Locksmiths out there, many of whom don’t even have those categories in their listing.

I think another change that needs to happen is borrow from Yelp and Facebook, and develop service categories that better describe what the business does without using the regular categories (mostly this applies to restaurants, such as kid friendly and waiter service, but it could apply to any business that really has to stretch the category list to find out how to describe their business), and use checkboxes and a free form field instead. Although Google has provided the Description, etc. in the Dashboard, Places owners are frequently creative in the wrong ways and take that as an opportunity to spam their own Place listing, and they’re not always sure what to do with that section of the Dashboard anyway. But I digress…

I appreciate your two posts on Map Maker. I have some questions specifically with regard to your description of “bots”.

I’m not sure I follow what you EXACTLY mean by this. While I understand the term bot with regard to general search engine lingo, I’m not sure how you are describing bots with regard to MM.

For instance I’m aware of a description of bots creating “null edits” with regard to MM. By that I understand that to mean:

1. A google bot reviewed the MM record.
2. Nothing was done to the record.
3. The edit history records an edit but nothing happened.

Is there more to this than I described? If so, what else is occurring?

In a different scenario a “bot” effects changes on an MM record.

How does that happen and exactly what occurs? I assume looking at some of our own records, and reflecting a full review of categories, I noticed that some of our smb’s have had an enormous volume of categories. They are far more comprehensive and diverse than what was placed in the places record. Specifically I saw categories that reflected descriptions from old YP’s. These particular categories have virtually no value to the business. They are incredibly tangential and from the perspective of the business they don’t convert. (after all that is where our ultimate interest lies).

I use these as an example with regard to the question about bots.

Is it possible that Google scraped all web documents that display NAP then aggregated all these categories and ultimately placed them on the MM record?

Is that an accurate description of the “bot phenomena” as you understand? If not, could you redescribe it?

If it is a description of part of the overall bot phenomena do you understand at all why some bots create “null edits” (ie no changes) and some create actual changes to the MM record? If so could you explain.

Further assuming this data assembles into the MM record. How then does it interact with the Places data?

As I looked at those ten to fifteen categories within MM for an smb, I don’t see it as a major issue, unless of course Google defines it as such. We never touched that part of the MM record. Its “growth” is a mystery to us as to how it occurred.

In fact what is the impact if any? Does that mean that the record might show in Maps/ a Pac/ a merged Pac/ or a pinned result for those types of search phrases?

Could it cause a penalty?

I appreciate in advance any further descriptions you can provide.

thanks, Dave