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Understanding Google My Business & Local Search

Catalog of Current Bugs in Google Places and the Google Places Dashboard

A number of contributors to the Places forums (Treebles, Helmut, Nyagoslav, Linda Buquet, myself) have assembled this first shot at a list of known bugs in Google Places and the Google Places Dashboard. Google is not currently publishing such a list and until they do, this list might help you understand if what you are experiencing is a known issue or not.

My hope is that by putting these in a single location it will save some of you time and/or frustrations as you experience the problem. This list is not comprehensive as we have not yet catalogued all bugs. If there are some that we have missed please add them as a comment and we will put them in our next update. Please include a reference link to the report in the forums. All of these issues are known to Google.

Date/Area Affected / Issue Reference URL Additional details
01/17/12 Places & Places Dashboard: Places Page Totally Disappear from both the Places index and the dashboard Places Forum Post Other reports here, here, here & here This does not seem very widespread but it is serious.
01/13/12 Places: Google adds the category “emergency” to
virtually all doctors & dentists Places listing whether they provide
emergency care or not
It appears to have happened concurrently with the 01/12/12 index push and is likely caused by bad source data
01/12/12 Places: When an owner response to a review exceeds 4094
characters Google responds with the meaningless error: Server error. Please
try again later.
Blumenthal’s Blog Comment I tested this & verified exactly where the bad messaging occurs
01/10/12 Places Mobile: Owner response does not show on iPhones Places Forum Post
01/06/12 Places Dashboard: Hours do not support 24 hr businesses Blumenthal’s Blog Comment Email from Google Support: “The underlying issue is that the system is not taking 12am-12am as valid operating hours” and “After speaking with our technical team members, your hours may or may not be listed as 12am to 12am after the next index push. There is the option not to display hours, which may be better suited for a 24 hours business, such as yourself.” Comment by Helmut: its a matter of the gl & hl-Parameters I believe. For German
listings Place supports 24 hour format.
12/29/11 Places: Owner can’t claim an unverified verified listing.
He will not -as used to be- get the three options “edit”,
“suspend” or “not my listing”
Places Forum Post
12/15/11 Places: Phone number is missing or replaced with Fax number on public facing Places page Places Forum Post
12/15/11 Places: Owner can not respond to reviews if the listing is
claimed into two accounts
Places Forum Post report in the German help forum as in URL-column –
as well as in the English Forum: here. This is an old problem that showed up first in 9/10 here. According to Google it is because there are two account holders and the one trying to answer is not the dominant one. However, given that the problem seems to pop up periodically in clusters it is possible that somehow the secondary account is automatically given prominence.
12/14/11 Places: Owner Review Response disappears Places Forum Post This can occur if the listing is claimed into more
than one account and the other account becomes dominant. Apparently though it can happen to any listing and it happened to Barbara Oliver where the
response just disappeared.
12/01/11 Places: Hours do not update on Place Page in timely fashion It, like the description, requires an index push to
change. Since that can be up to 6 weeks out, the feature is not usable for seasonal changes in hours. I experienced with Barbara Oliver in Buffalo
NY
11/28/11 Places Dashboard: Places Dashboard Stats show 0 Impressions & 0
Actions
Places Forum Post Fix in the works
11/10/11 Places Dashboard: Owner can’t claim a verified listing. The used to be working phone lookup method will not find the business Places Forum Post Europe This is only in certain European countries?
11/01/11 Places Dashboard: Photos don’t work when you try to add photos using a
link from another site
Places Forum Post Public comment from Google- All: We’re working on long-term changes to photos and photo uploads. It’s going to be awhile, so in the mean time, I strongly suggest you upload photos via your listing and manage them from your Picasa Web account.
09/01/11 Places Dashboard: South African Google Places doesn’t work (for 3+
months now)
Places Forum Post Google recommended using the verification
troubleshooter in these cases.
Places: reviews disappear & associate with the wrong
cluster
Places Forum Post Vanessa did a great summary of the bugs & other issues that are currently affecting reviews.
Places: Categories show 10 categories when claimed into two
accounts
Can be resolved via “report a problem”.
It is another artifact of allowing a listing to be claimed into more than one account
Places: A duplicate listing is created IF the claimant
changes too much basic information at the time of change
Feature Or Bug?
Places Dashboard: Preselected State gives error that State does not
exist when creating a new listing
Fix coming
Places Dashboard: Search for an already existing listing bug When a person tries to search for a listing using
the phone number (via the add new business page), the page reverts back without any result, unless they have chosen the correct area language.