We have about 10 clients that have lost their Google Places/Google + Local business listing. I have tried all the tricks, even recreated listings like Google suggested. Still “we do not support this location”. I have the original id’s for most and when I do what is suggested above I cannot see the listing anywhere. Is there no hope at this point?

For those suffering loss of Place page I thought it might be helpful to point out if it’s not crystal clear, these removals were for quality guideline violations. Not just the hide your address rule. So in addition to hiding address do through inventory of listings to be sure no other violations. Check categories for the is not does rule, and check for any other violations too.

Thought I’d also copy that latest support email I referred to above here as well. Support also corrects his use of caps – so again really carefully check your listings before submitting to support using #4 in the link above.

GOOGLE SUPPORT EMAIL copied from forum:

“Thank you for contacting Google. Your A & S PLUMBING listing was
experiencing issues due to quality violations. Specifically, using a
residential address as your business location.

In the course of reviewing your question, we took the step of hiding your business address, since it appears that you do not make contact with customers at your physical location. If you do make contact with customers at your location, you may uncheck this box within your Places dashboard.

I also changed your “A & S PLUMBING” to ‘A & S Plumbing’ since we do not allow for information to be in ALL CAPS.

To ensure that your listings contain the most accurate information
possible please continue to freshen the data on your listing from your
account by clicking “Edit” from your dashboard, then clicking “Submit” to
send your information to Google Maps on a regular basis. Your listing
should be live within 1-2 weeks.

Check out the guidelines here:
http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528&ctx=cb&src=cb&cbid=-1qeq4rikeo6cp&cbrank=2.

If your listing is not live after 2 weeks, or if you have any questions or
concerns please reply back to this email thread and I will be happy to
help.”

@Mike: @Ben is a well known spammer by the name of Armand Peri, who runs a spam strip club ’empire’ under the brand name of Hunkamania. He has, at most, one location in NYC, and another in Atlantic City. By ‘multiple accounts’ he thinks I’m his competitor, Tracy James, who ran the competing Savage Men network, and also another RER by the name of Mxx. By damage, he means that he hasn’t been able to effectively spam Google Places, because I pulled down about 40 or so spam locations. At this point, he should be aware that GMM knows about his activities, knows exactly where his two locations are, and knows that he’s been using multiple accounts on GMM to promote his spam locations as well as sabotage that of his competitors. In the instance of where I did use multiple MM IDs, I was pretty transparent about it, and I didn’t use either account to make any edits to Armand’s locations, his insane belief to the contrary. He’s been quite active on the Google Places forums using multiple pseudonyms (unlike Armand, I’ve never used any other name except Dan Austin, and my real world name has always been tied to my internet handle), his locations are transparently spammy, and he’s reporting a lot of false and defamatory information. If he would play by the rules (I’ve never touched any of his real locations), this wouldn’t be an issue. Instead, he thinks he can game the system, and all the damage to his business model (lost revenue) have come about from him breaking the rules. The MM POI he pointed out has merged with his listing, but as the original history shows, the POI actually belongs to Savage Men. If he was smart, he would report it instead of trying to manipulate it on MM, but some people just can’t resist the temptation to meddle in things they don’t understand. Finally, I should point out that Tracy James, with my encouragement, tried to come to an understanding with Armand: each was going to establish their ‘real’ locations, leave each other’s listings alone, and stop spamming Google Places. Armand turned him down. So as a result, everything Armand puts up gets pulled down.

Wow at the vile commentary that has spilled over from MapMaker to this blog piece.

The interactivity of MapMaker and Places and the ability to spam in one place or the other with little oversight from google, tempered only by a volunteers trying to do the right thing….is simply astonishing.

Its an astonishing Wild West environment inside the World’s dominant and monopoly directory of all businesses, in which for the most part, Google is primarily hands off and the businesses suffer the consequences.

Nobody gets on Google to put in the resources to clean up its act.

Dan: Thanks for your directions written within the post and your response inside the comments section.

If nothing else this is the tip of the iceberg on the ugly realities inside google places –okay Google+Local.

Danielle, Mike just wrote this reply in another post re the do no support message.

“You need to understand though that this message happens for 4 reasons:
1)The listing is new and has not yet been indexed
2)Google has determined that the listing is egregious spam and it has been removed from the index
3)Google has cast a spam net too far and erroneously taken down listings
4)A bug and Google has inadvertently lost your listing (perhaps due to #3 or some other reason)

The only way to know for sure if it is category two, three or four is to ask google via the troubleshooters in the Google Places for Business help files. If the reason is three or four they will tell you if and when it might come back. If it is issue 2 you are screwed.”

Mike – I thought I’d update the group on what’s happened so far with getting our listing live again on Google+Local. At a high-level, it’s not live (“location not supported” issue showing active in places dashboard but not live).

After a few back-and-forths, I was given the feedback that my listing was removed algorithmically because Google thought it was a duplicate listing due to our office moving buildings in the same office complex, ie the address stayed the same but the office number in the complex changed. I did make the change of the office # in Google Places correctly probably a year ago and never had an issue until this past May when the listing was removed. The conversation ended a week ago no update on status here yet — sadly listing still down.

I was also notified that they found the hours we specified as being odd (we use 6a – 5:30a to show we’re 24 hours) since there isn’t a better way to represent 24 /7 service given the time options offered. I asked for a recommendation on how to specify 24 hour service more clearly but no response back.

Most peculiarly, I was also told that since our business is both a store and a service, that the hours I put on Google Places needed to be for the store’s operating hours. I brought up the point that a lot of our business comes before and after store hours, and that if Google showed we were closed in a search during those times it would be very bad for us. In essence does this requirement mean we’re forced to:
a) hide our address so we can show we offer service 24/7 and lose the ability to recruit customers to our store or even indicate it exists, or
b) show our address but have google report we’re closed for many of the hours we offer service?

I asked for feedback here, or a better option, but again no feedback yet.

We’ve now had our listing down for over 2 months, sure hoping we can make some progress this week.

@Jeff: You used to be able to set 24/7 by setting it as 12:00am-12:00am Mon-Sun (I’ve seen that on a lot of POIs) but some changes since then have prevented that from being a viable solution. I’ve requested that Google make two changes, namely add a 24/7 checkbox to Map Maker, the Dashboard, and Community Edits, and create the ability to customize hours so that you can put in (with your own label), let’s say emergency hours (24/7) and office hours (Mon-Fri 9am-5pm), which is common for a lot of service-oriented businesses, or bar hours and restaurant hours, which is also common for restaurants that have both a bar and a restaurant. At the very least, an engineer should resolve the 24/7 bug and Google Places should issue some notification in the guidelines and forums on how to represent 24/7, since it’s a widespread problem.

@Mike. I experimented quite a bit with MM, and you could create it using the method I entailed (Mon-Sun 12am-12am). For a brief period (months), I tried different methods using the community edits on the Place page and was able to create the 24/7 with some success by copying the methodology I found for Place pages that were able to represent themselves as open 24/7 (basically, every day is open, and hours are 0:00-0:00), similar to MM. Since the Maps and MM updates, this is no longer the case. Any business that is open 24/7 on the Place page has been grandfathered in using other sources(?), and any changes made from MM for 24/7 show as null edits (nothing changes). Frustrating.

@Mike. I was hoping you would talk to Larry Page and sort this out! I filed at least three issues (1571, 2662, 2178) on MM Issue Tracker (http://code.google.com/p/google-mapmaker) related to this. Acknowledged, but no progress that I can see. Perhaps escalate it on the Places side, since this is a cross-platform data problem?

@Greg: Use Move Marker, Edit Details, or Report a problem in Maps sidebar, or Edit Details or Edit Business Details on the Google+Local page.