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Understanding Google My Business & Local Search

Google Maps: LBC broken and more

This posting from yesterday’s Google Maps Business Owners Group was of interest to me.

The Local Business Center has been broken for several weeks, preventing many business owners from updating listings. There have been numerous reports in the Groups of this problem.

As noted in the comment, when a business attempts to update an LBC record, the following message is frequently recieved:

System Error
We’re sorry, but we are unable to serve your request at this time.

Google acknowledged the error on October 1 and it was reported of and on since late August. Google has not identified a timeframe for its repair.

=======================================
TOPIC: Unable to list my listings on google map.
=======================================

== 1 of 1 ==
Date: Sat, Oct 11 2008 2:46 am
From: “furtherclient101036@googlemail.com”

Hello, I am a freelancer from india and working from home. I currently
got job for adding 1400 google business listings of uk restaurants and
each listings needs to be added under individual google account. The
verification method i have to choose is verification by post card. So
that those individual restaurants can receive confirmation pin code at
their end and they can login to google with their account and can
confirm their listing.

I am able to create 10 listings until now under 10 individual
accounts, but now i am not able to add more listings, I am receiving
below mentioned error.

“System Error
We’re sorry, but we are unable to serve your request at this time.
Please try back in a few minutes.”

But this error doesn’t shows when i login from my personal account to
check same if also i am getting the same error.!

I know i am not spamming google, its the genuine work which i am
doing. Those people in foreign doesn’t have time for such tasks and
thus they had hired me.

Any help on this issue is very much expected and welcome!

The Indian subcontractor aspect of the post also intrigues me. Think locally, but act globally appears to be the new motto for Map data entry. It is an interesting development that low cost Indian workers are getting involved in Maps and that companies are choosing this route versus the bulk upload choice. It indicates to me that, as it is currently designed, the bulk upload option is not perceived as functional enough. For example, listings entered that way can still be modified via community edits (in the US) and often do not have the authority of a manually entered and verified record. I am quite sure that WalMart doesn’t want their listing fiddled with.

This posting is an interesting contrast to my earlier post about an Indian IT firm that outsourced local US mapspam to-itself.

It clearly demonstrates the growing perception of value of having a Local OneBox listing. I wonder how much it costs to have a sub contractor on the sub continent of India, enter these records manually. Can anyone enlighten me?