Google Places has become a powerfully painful annoyance. Constant rules changes. Accounts listed for months suddenly not in compliance. Account suspended for who knows what reasons – and without notice unless you see the dashboard. Merged listings. “The Google” making the rules for what constitutes a legitimate business. Just a royal pain.

The G’s rules don’t always reflect the reality of small business. The Facebook and The Bing are much easier to deal with.

I’ve been going back and forth forever (over a year) now. Mine is a home based web design business and I do not want my address shown. Only recently have they made that bearable, but in the meantime I had a PMB address (not a PO Box) to use as my business address. Worked fine for a long time and Places even had the info from aggregators. Boom- account suspended now – again. The PMB address (UPS) store has been the ONLY address I’ve used for five years (with exception of PO box for mail).

Tried to delete and reclaim with home address info. Nothing. This is ridiculous. Why do they make us guess what they object to?

If a business has had but one address for five years, what makes it illegitimate? Because searchers expect to drop in? (BTW, an addition to the hours of operation as ‘by appointment only’ is not unreasonable and would solve that searcher ‘problem’).

I could spend a lot more money and rent one of those ‘virtual offices’ to use as my address. How is that different from a UPS store address? In either case, the business is ‘there’ but not ‘there’.

Just make it a paid service and give us some support – that would have saved me a lot of time and aggravation.

AAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH.

Thanks for starting a new post Mike. I was afraid not many would see my last 2 posts on that older thread.

I’m subscribed to the Places Forum….OMG seeing more messages//problems over the last few days than any other day in the last month!!!! Guess there are problems all over

Linda: I’m confident that the number of complaints and problems are ALWAYS the tip of an iceberg. I say that because many businesses have no idea about their places page, never look at it, probably don’t know what its called, don’t realize that google controls the page–not them, and frankly when consumers/users rely on misinformation from the page…the consumers think the business itself is responsible for posting the misinformation.

I say that from experience with regard to businesses with problems that stem from google places information or misinformation due to the unstable nature of the cluster. Some examples are older –one is fairly recent from a business that posted about a problem a relatively short while ago.

The business has received calls or had visits from misinformation in the Places Page for years. Okay….yes….some of the wrong calls could have come from a different 3rd party on the web….but that is highly highly unlikely…..Google is the big monopoly on the web for visits and views into the internet when searching for information about a local smb.

the calls would come in and staff would have to deal with it. The staff is not knowledgeable about the google places page. If its a larger business with multiple staff…there is even less awareness.

The business with which I’m most recently aware of this issue kept getting calls and irate customers because of some totally misleading information. Its got to come from some aspect of the cluster.

Ultimately one of those calls escalated to the GM who was also responsible for the Places Page….though never spends time checking it….and the only way the manager could figure it out…was because the irate, angry customer took a screen shot of the Places Page and emailed it to the business.

that is a one in a thousand possibility.

I know plenty of small businesses around where I normally work. I speak with a bunch of them. Of them I have yet to speak with one that spends any time on his/her places page. Not one.

None of us know precisely the size or scope of problems on the places pages…but we’ll have a hard time figuring it out…because probably a vast majority of the smb operators out there don’t know what is going on in their own pages and whether there is a problem or not.

Google has gone fully retarded, we have an hq and depot, guess what Google My Business is now run by poorly trained call centre on crappy VOIP lines.

no reason for suspension and advised to “recreate listing from another account”

Surely google can afford decent trained call centre and staff that can understand you.

Tried calling London HQ and bloody useless automated 90’s crap push button system