It simply strikes me as to the following:

1. Google is immensely large and has an incredible impact across the board, on all kinds of businesses, across the continents. Its a power of a sort we have never experienced before. Its unique, but utterly immense and wide ranging.

2. With regard to this power over local businesses there is no oversight in any way shape or form. Google moves at its own pace, in its own way, and is not accountable to any entity in any way.

3. Besides being immensely powerful with the potential for incredible impact it doesn’t communicate. A TC had to respond on a question toward the end of the thread: not google. An SMB was astounded he actually communicated to somebody within Google + Local. That was an occasion for once in a million astonishment. They don’t speak to anyone.

This blog explains things better and more coherently than google.

I truly feel as it regards Google +Local I”m living in feudal times and am required to give tribute to the all powerful local lord in his castle who has all power over our life and death.

….and I thought we had made social progress.

@Mark we are about to get a Google punching dummy in the office because of how frustrated we are.

Clients yell at my team all the time for issues with Google+ Local pages that are out of our control. We have taken all the steps to fix issues but nothing gets fixed. The best part is when information from one of our clients pages changes to their competitors page. I’m talking phone number, website and pictures so now the competitor is getting all my clients customers. Another instance is with this poor old lady who was getting phone calls from 7am to 7pm for days because the phone number of our clients hair salon was replaced randomly with hers. The info in our dashboard is all correct but not on the live pages. The client calls us and chews us out so we figure at least if we get the punching dummy we can optimize our bodies by wailing on the thing because optimizing these Google+ Local pages is killing us. We even bought ad words just to talk to some one from Google. The Adwords rep was great and it really felt good to talk to someone from Google even if nothing was going to get done other wise I’d have to pay a shrink to optimize my mind cause optimizing these Google+ Local pages is…

Mike, I emailed you but, on reflection, this might be a very widespread problem that you can help with…

As I explained some weeks ago in another comment, my Google Places account is on the same gmail address as the one I have for Analytics and Webmaster Tools but my rel=author and Google Plus are all on a different gmail address.

Obviously I need to combine the two.

When I tried to claim my existing page on the other gmail address, it forced me to create a new listing.

So, as per the instructions that were in force then, I have created and applied for a new Google Places page on the Google Plus/rel address.

However, I have not verified yet because I know I will lose my reviews and end up with the possibility of a duplicate listing so was holding off whilst I thought it all through.

I noticed in this post that there is a link on the transferring troubleshooter so that I can change the gmail address that runs my google account.

If I change the gmail on which I have my existing personal and business Google Plus, YouTube and rel=author to the one that runs my Places, Webmaster Tools and Analytics, will this be a seamless transition that will pull them all together without me losing reviews or rel=author?

I will then be left with one gmail address that has no other google properties attached to it.

My poor brain is going into meltdown trying to work out all the ramifications so the views of a clear and experienced head would be worth its weight in gold

Pretty please x

@Mike
Many thanks for posting, as always.

@Google
Oh, why couldn’t you have hired a couple more of your brilliant kind to staff the support team, so that current ones wouldn’t have to work so very hard in the first place…

Your excellent A+ Google Support Team. Peace out!