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Understanding Google My Business & Local Search

Google Updates Places Time to Live for Dashboard Data

The last 3 or 4 months in Places have been quite erratic. Some data that had been posting from Places in moments had gone to weeks. It seemed that things like descriptions could take 6 to 7 weeks. Google has just announced a new speedier update cycle of “usually a few days” for most data and “about a week” for photos in this forum post. It will still take a number of weeks to resolve dupes and merges. Here is the full body of the post:

Hey all,
There have been a lot of questions in the forum lately about verifying new listings and making updates to existing ones, and we wanted to clear up some of that confusion. We’ve been doing some work on our backend, cleaning up the pipes in order to make more improvements to Google Places over time. Here are the typical turnaround times for updates you make in your Google Places account.
What will usually update in a few days:
• Newly verified listings (even though it reads “Active” in your dashboard)
      –> This includes newly verified bulk uploads (and any attributes, as noted below)
• Business titles
• Addresses
• Phone numbers
• Website URLs
• Pin marker moves
• Descriptions
• Hours
• Categories
What will update in about a week:
• Photos
• Videos
What will typically take several weeks to resolve:
• Merged listings
• Duplicate listings
The Post to your Place page feature (http://goo.gl/f8bCp) should update to your listing near instantly, but we’re experiencing some technical issues with that right now. Expect a fix soon.
Also, please note that reviews are not affected by these new changes. If you’re experiencing technical issues with the reviews on your listing, please see this Help Center article for more information: http://goo.gl/emQsE
Thanks,
Vanessa

Several notes.

While waiting for your listing to go live after a claim it will likely show the “We do not currently support this location” message for the duration of the waiting period. During this “waiting period” the standard “tickle your Places record with an edit” fix for this problem will have no affect. Going forward it is not clear if the fix will still be needed or not on records that go south after verification with the error.

Some updates seem to take a few days longer than a “few” with some taking 6 to 7 days but it seems that has been improving over the past week.

Note that Vanessa said: We’ve been doing some work on our backend, cleaning up the pipes in order to make more improvements to Google Places over time. Hopefully we will continue to see improvements in a range of the problem areas and Places bugs of the past.

Let me know how long your updates are taking!