Alert reader Nico has  pointed out that Google has publicly committed to the rollout of Plus features for bulk upload users on their Help Pages.

We’ve listened carefully to your feedback. In the future, you’ll be able to:

• Make updates and posts to your customers using the Google+ page for your location
• See Insights to help you track your business’s performance on Google
• Filter to view relevant subsets of locations within your account

Google almost never publicly talks about futures which implies that this feature might be closer than we had thought. It certainly is a last, remaining brick for the foundation of Google Local being built on top of Plus. It is critical to have parity across all local pages and this would offer that missing feature to bulk users.

In other news, Google confirmed that with the most recent upgrade to the Bulk accounts, listings will be locked from being dual claimed. This means that 1)listings will be more secure and 2)bulk users will not be able to selectively upgrade specific bulk uploaded listings to Plus (which many have been doing) UNTIL the above feature is released.

Today on the Google webmaster blog Google has announced upgraded Schema support for additional phone types and detailed specific recommendations for using Schema.org on location pages. It is unfortunate but Google did not include a new schema for call tracking. Obviously this granular detail is useful for achieving more accuracy in Knowledge Graph answer boxes. From the post:

Four types of phone numbers are currently supported:

• Customer service
• Technical support
• Billing support
• Bill payment

For each phone number, you can also indicate if it is toll-free, suitable for the hearing-impaired, and whether the number is global or serves a specific countries. Learn how to specify your national customer service numbers.

The recommendations for location pages do not seem new and reinforce what many have been saying but they do clearly articulate what multi-location store finder pages should look like:

Specifically:

• Have each location’s or branch’s information accessible on separate webpages
• Allow Googlebot to discover and crawl the location pages
• The location information should be presented in an easy-to-understand format
• Use schema.org structured data markup
• A note about mobile-optimized websites: many users access location pages using their smartphones. In addition to the specific guidelines above, make sure that your site is optimized for smartphone devices, and that the information you share on the location pages is easily consumed on smartphones.

The note to be sure that information is presented in a way easy for the bot to understand bears repeating as many corporate sites create pages that are too complex:

information [should] be accessible on a unique URL, and you should avoid showing important location information using complex Javascript. Store location pages should ideally contain as much information as possible when the page loads. If additional data needs to be loaded after an action, such as a user click, it is preferable that the additional data is present on a separate store-specific URL and linked to using a simple HTML link rather than Javascript. As much as possible, try to avoid using Javascript for showing location information.

Update: Google has confirmed that the new bulk upload uses the same “one claim rule” as the new Places Dashboard and Plus. This means that once an account has been upgraded that the listings will not be able to be claimed into either Google Plus/Places Dashboard or another bulk account (at least not one that has been upgraded). This is one more step in making bulk listings more secure than in the past..

Google recently added new features to the bulk upload (week before last) and they are announcing another set of new features today. Hat tip to Linda Buquet for spotting and Max Minzer for pointing out.

Google Jade posted the following in the forums:

We are rolling out new features for the bulk location management tool in the coming weeks to make your experience even better.  We’re upgrading accounts gradually, and once your account is upgraded, these features will be available. Please be patient if you don’t see these features right away.

Please see the attached screenshot for an example of what your will look like if you’ve got the new features.

The current set of new features include:

Status of your locations on Maps: Now, we’ll show you a column that describes the status of each location on Maps. You’ll be able to tell at a glance which locations are live, unverified, have errors or data conflicts, are duplicates, or are pending review.

Updated data conflicts interface: The updated interface will show you details on how a location page might differ on Maps/Search results versus what’s in your dashboard. We’ll show you what is live on Google, and which field is different from what’s in your dashboard. From there, you’ll be able to take action.

Improved edit timeframe: We’re working on improving the speed with which your data goes live on Google.

Learn more about changes to bulk management.

Click to view larger

The rapid changes to the bulk feature are a good sign that Google is actively rolling out upgrades. The increased feedback about duplicates and data consistency will be very helpful to those managing a large number of listings. In the past, you never knew from the dashboard what the real status of a given listing was and you had to go into Maps and individually check them out. A real pain and it meant that listings that you thought were active were in reality, not.

But the faster edit timeframe is a critical upgrade. The bulk tool most likely now uses the same faster pipelines that are used by Plus, the new Places Dashboard and Mapmaker and it means that results should go live very quickly. One presumes that many of the changes will go live within hours if not minutes although some are likely to take longer. This is a necessary step before the bulk listings can be moved fully over to Plus. Who knows when but at least it is now possible as all of the primary input interfaces are accessing the same architecture.

It also raises the question of whether these listings are now falling under the claim once rule of the new Places dashboard or still are governed by the claim many times possible in the old dashboard. If the former, security of a listing will be improved. I have asked Google to clarify.

Google has in the past penalized it’s own properties five times for breaking its own SEO rules. Matt Cutts has apparently now also sanctioned Google Plus with a manual penalty. Here are the comments from the internal email that was forwarded to me:

“Forks or no forks, we believe that the Plus team has overdone their link building. Starting at 9 am tomorrow we have manually applied a penalty to the subdomain. This problem first came to light when an engineer working the PR Toolbar noticed that the Plus sub domain had achieved a page rank of 11. We decided we either had to act or change the algorithm. Neither choice was appealing but the manual penalty seemed the more appropriate path”.

He went on to say that:

“[there] are a number of violations of our linking policies that we have repeatedly pointed out to the team but its seems that we have been ignored. They include but are not limited to:

Rel Publisher – we have long ago deprecated header links in our algo but the Plus team was insistent on pushing them into the market place at such scale that they were impacting ranking.

Rel Author – We absolutely can not allow the quid pro quo of a photo that increases click throughs in return for a link. It’s not a paid link but it effectively is pay to play even if it has generated significant traffic for Plus.

In-Post Do follow Links – while we recently no followed links from profiles, all of the links inside of Plus posts are still do-follow links. Given our current policy on guest blogging, we need to hold the same standard for Google Plus.”

I have written before about the fact that it is not possible to merge a G+ Page for local with other page types like brand or company. But the question of the relative value of one page versus another is an om-going question for me. Is there a benefit to having both page types if so when and what type of business would do best to do so?

I raised the question on Google Plus and am posting the conversation here as it has been very valuable:

Posted from 20,000 ft on my iPhone so forgive any typos.

Googler Jade, who seems to be everywhere these days doing everything, just posted these notes about an upgrade to the bulk tool:

Importing a spreadsheet to the bulk upload tool is now improved. Now, when you import a file, you’ll see a preview of changes that will be made and be able to cancel out any unintentional changes. We hope this allows you to better manage information on your business locations.

A few more details–

The import preview will have:
A summary of the total number of locations included in your account prior to upload and the total number of locations in the file being imported.

A series of tabs with the type of change your current import will have on your account and the number of locations that will be changed in each. The types of changes that are listed are: new, changed, missing, ignored, and unchanged. Please see our Help Center for a more detailed explanation of each type of change.

The tabs make it much easier to see exactly what changes will be applied to your account. If you see an unexpected number of locations in a tab (more “new” locations than you mean to add, for example), you can investigate further before applying any changes. You can read some tips on troubleshooting an import file here.

Please note that store codes are now mandatory to enable this feature. Learn more about the new improved import process.

Google’s crowd sourced map building and listing has succeeded on a number of fronts at allowing maps and listings to be updated at a pace that no one else in the industry can keep up. While the mapping side has little economic incentive for cheating, the listing side is prime for self serving activities. For some period of time there has been an asymmetry in that it seems that it has been easier for the crowd to create spam than for the crowd to get rid of it.

Dan Austin has been active in the MapMaker community for a long time. He has, over the past few years focused on reporting and trying to remove spam from the system particularly in the Locksmith arena.  Here is a case study on his recent experiences with the “Report a Problem” feature; Google’s primary spam reporting mechanism.

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After Bryan Seely released the exploits he used to add false and misleading (spammy) listings to Google Maps on Mike’s blog as well as on Valleywag, Google went into full PR damage control and made some changes in how they handle local spam, including ending phone call PIN code verification for new businesses on Places. After reading this statement from Google, I decided to test whether or not the new Maps Report a problem is effective for removing spam:  

We work hard to remove listings that are reported to violate our policies as quickly as possible, and to check bad actors that try to game the system by altering business descriptions once they are live on Google Maps. We encourage users to let us know when they see something that might violate our guidelines by using our “Report a problem” tool, found at the bottom right corner of the map. Everyday there are thousands of great edits that get made to Google Maps through Map Maker.

The problem with Report a problem is that historically it hasn’t worked very well for spam, in my three years using it to report hundreds of spam listings. Either the response was too slow (often months), and/or unsatisfactory (i.e the spam remained on Maps). My success rate with Report a problem (reporting a wide variety of spam points of interest (POI), including locksmiths), has hovered around 5%, which is why I switched to more effective takedown mechanisms like Google Map Maker (MM) in order to remove spam. Unfortunately, MM itself has become more problematic, with the introduction of GLEs (Google Listing Editors from Places), who are now reviewing edits to claimed listings. They have systematically degraded the effectiveness of MM to the point that it’s now impossible to remove many spam POIs, no matter how obvious, as they have been denying almost all edits (including spam removals) to claimed POIs, or closing the spammy POIs instead of removing them (a business that doesn’t exist can’t, by its very nature, be closed).  

Moreover, after Places segregated Service Area Businesses (SAB) that hid their address from MM, many spammy POIs disappeared from MM altogether, making those impossible to report as well. It also broke the reporting mechanisms on Google+Local Edit detailsfor SABs, which uses MM to report edits (and the Classic Maps Report a problem, which also used MM). Here’s an example of a spam SAB with the address hidden that can’t be reported in either Google+Local or MM:  

Aron Locksmith: https://plus.google.com/103220027599977382429

Place page:  

Fake reviews from spam profiles:  

Clicking on Edit details leads to this error page (which is the same for all SABs on Google+Local that hide their address):   Continue reading →