Press enter to see results or esc to cancel.

Understanding Google My Business & Local Search

Google+ Local Pages Category Confusion

With the rollout of the new G+ local pages, a number of readers reported seeing erroneous categories associated with their listing in G+ local. Jim Froling of 949local.com sent along the examples below that show the types of information that is showing up.

Joel Headley noted at the Getlisted Local Advanced seminar in Seattle last week (if you weren’t there you missed a great day) that it isn’t some new bug or quirk. These additional categories are showing because Google already had the information associated with your listing but up until the G+ local rollout had not been showing the information. If you want to fix this information you can request a category removal either via the new community edit or directly in MapMaker.

David Mihm noted last week that he had noticed that Google+ Local was pulling information from MapMaker and perhaps even giving preferential treatment to that information. At some level that is true.

In March, Google updated the backend of their data pipeline in Places. This is the technology that pushes data from one of Google’s many trusted sources (Dashboard, MapMaker, 3rd Party Sources, vetted community edits or Google edits) to the Place/Google+ Local page. This new backend views MapMaker as one of the sources of trusted data AND due to upgrades in the flow of data pushes that data into G+ local fairly quickly. At the moment, even more quickly than the Dashboard does. Once the dashboard has been updated and the Google+ business page has been created from the Google+ local page, that dashboard will push data even faster to a claimed, an even more trusted, way. For now, Google MapMaker is the fastest way to get information onto a Google+ local page.