Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Do Bugs Precede Places Updates?
Historically it has been true that major updates to Google Places have been preceeded by more annoying and obvious bugs than normal being highlighted in the forums and elsewhere. In the case of the recent update that occurred on July 21st, there were a number of these bugs noted in the forums starting in early July.
| Event | Date of Forum Mention |
| Reviews Go Missing | 7/4/11 |
| Descriptions Missing | 7/6/11 |
| All Listings Hit Pending | 7/17/11 |
| Places Update Goes Live | 7/21/11 |
While correlation is not causation I do not think that it is coincidental that these “bugs” started shortly after the rollout of the new Google look and Google+ at the end of June. I also think it likely and have seen indications that in addition to changes in the Places layout there were under the hood changes to the review spam tagging algo and the rules that enforce the quality quidelines.
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Comments
5 Comments
Not sure if this is a bug or even relevant to the new changes since I just discovered this yesterday but it is possible to have all 5 categories in a place page with custom words. I never got the usual warning when saving changes as you would normally.
I noticed this in 2 of my listings yesterday and I have to check about 100 more today. One listing is established (+1 year) and the other is about 3 months new.
Those two specific listings fell off the grid in local search since the Google changes and that is what made me go in and look.
Everyone may already be aware of this but I am making sure I slip at least one Google category into my listings.
@Trina
That is interesting. It could be a temporary glitch or it could be the new policy.
Mike, what kind of enforcement have you seen on the quality guidelines? I am curious because with the everything in pending and then magically everything is not a few days later it has been hard to judge exactly what is a quality enforcement and what is just a bug.
Well it seems that rules that were once only enforced if a record was “touched” have not been hard coded into the core of the system and will reject records previously left unscathed… in the example I looked at it appears for example that the 4 cap rule is being enforced that way.
Mike, this is not the first case actually. At least in the last few months since I am closely following the changes on Places, every time when there is going to be rolled an update – no matter if it would be interface modification or data update. Usually the prequel of an update consists of loss of Analytics data, all listings under review, mass “We currently do not support the location” glitch. These are the most common ones. This time, as the update is truly a big one, the bugs are more than usual, and some of them are even still not resolved…
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