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Understanding Google My Business & Local Search

Best Practice For Your Google Listing- Record the URLs from +, Maps and MapMaker

MapMaker, despite its bugs and quirks, has taken on an ever increasing role in the health of your business listing in Google. Being able to find and edit the listing in MapMaker has become critical.

Last week in Dan Austin’s post: A Step By Step To Recover Your “We Currently Do Not Support This” Location in MapMaker he noted that it was a best practice to record your listing’s url in Google+, Google Maps and Google MapMaker. Having these handy in times of trouble will facilitate diagnosis and repair if your listing goes south. 

I wanted to highlight his suggestion in its own post so that the recommendation achieved the visibility it deserved. Here are the steps to obtaining this critical information for your listing:

1- From the Places Dashboard click on “view” from the analytics page or “See your listing in Google Maps” from the locations page and it will take you to the Google+ URL & number that will look like:
https://plus.google.com/102992615806778826953/about?gl=US&hl=en-US

Which can be shortened to:
Google+ Local URL: https://plus.google.com/102992615806778826953/

2- From Google Plus Local page click on the Map Pin for the listing and it will take you to Google Maps and give the Maps URL and its CID:
https://maps.google.com/maps?ie=UTF8&cid=9198701853947205333&q=South+Towns+Surgical+Associates+-+Alvarez+Julio+A+MD&iwloc=A&gl=US&hl=en-US

Which can be shortened to:
Google Maps URL: https://maps.google.com/maps?cid=9198701853947205333

3- You can then take the CID from that URL and insert it into the following Mapmaker url: “http://www.google.com/mapmaker?gw=90&cid=”
to create the MapMaker URL for the listing:

Google MapMaker URL: http://www.google.com/mapmaker?gw=90&cid=9198701853947205333

With this information you can communicate clearly to Google Places for Business support and as Dan noted “If you have that info, then almost any POI [in MapMaker] is recoverable and editable, no matter what it’s status”.