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Understanding Google My Business & Local Search

Google’s Worst Customer Service Response EVER

Several week ago a large number of mostly service area listings started receiving the dreaded “We currently do not support the location” message. At the time Google noted that “your listing may have been dropped due to a technical issue that we cannot yet resolve. We hope to have a resolution soon for this issue, at which point we will be in touch with next steps to help you return your business to Google Maps“.

Last week Michael Borgelt sent me a copy of this email that Google had started sending to those inappropriately affected by the “We do not support” message on their listing (bold mine) :

Hello,

Thanks for your patience in waiting for an update on your Google Maps listing. If you’re still receiving the “We currently do not support the location” error message, then your listing was affected by a technical issue and there are a couple of things you can do to help restore it to Google Maps.

First, review our quality guidelines. If your location doesn’t meet these guidelines, it may have been removed from Maps. Especially check out this article about service-area businesses, and hiding your address in case your business is at a residential location:http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=177103

If you’re confident that your business fits within our guidelines, then search for your business at mapmaker.google.com and see if it has been marked as removed. If you’re able to find it, attempt to undo the removal and reinstate your listing on Maps. It may take a couple of days for your reinstatement to be processed.

If you’re unable to reinstate your page this way, then please remove your listing from your Google Places dashboard by clicking “Delete” then “Remove my listing from my Google Places account,” then recreate the listing. You will need to undergo PIN verification again if that was your original verification process, but doing so may cause your listing to surface cleanly on Maps once you input your new PIN.

Thanks for your patience and understanding with this process, and we hope to continue to improve your experience in Google Local and on Google Maps.

Best,
The Google Local Team

This response qualifies as not just the worst customer service response ever from Google, but perhaps the worst customer service response ever. It is as if the printed Yellow Pages didn’t print your listing due to their error and then told you that you needed to go down to their office and enter it yourself on their arcane typesetting machine. Hello?

Some notes:
Every time I think that “We currently do not support the location” is a bug, I discover that it is instead an intentional message. If you receive it at the beginning of the listing cycle it means: We have not had time to process your listing. If you receive it after your listing has been active for a while it means: Dude, either we or one of our MapMaker volunteers has pulled your listing down for violation of some rule stated or not.

In this particular case, it seems that Google realized that they pulled a few too many down and they are expecting those suffering the fate in error to fix the problem themselves.

Now that is chutzpah.

What you should do:

It appears from everything that I can gather from these emails and this post is that this pull down affected listings that Google suspected of not being in compliance with the requirement to hide your address. Some listings, as you can see from this forum post may have also been tagged due to MM rules.

Regardless, if your listing deserves to be in the index, then you have no choice but to follow the advice given above. It essentially means that one way or another your listing will be vetted yet once again, either by a MM moderator or the Places verification system. Your choice.