Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
G+ Local URLs MIA
With the help of Annie & Lisa Kolb from Acorn, I became aware of a new bug affecting Google’s local index where the URL of the listng’s site and occasionally the telephone number are stripped from the search result and the G+ Page. The URL is replaced with the plus.google.com URL in the search results. It seems to strike listings that have been claimed via the dashboard as well as merged listings that have been verified via Google+.
The problem seems to reside in the final local index as there is no indication of the problem in the respective MapMaker records or the Places Dashboard. The problem is fairly widespread. Google has acknowledged and is aware of the problem and has started a thread to collect reports of the issue.
Here are some links that Acorn discovered in their research if you want to see other examples.
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Comments
3 Comments
Hey Mike,
We finally got our Google Local PIN in the mail, and did the merge. I’ve noticed the same results here in Canada where it’s listing the Google Plus Business page not the ‘local/places’ result.
Hopefully this gets sorted out Soon.
– Andrew
Mike, today I was able to go in and “add” information to one of the affected properties via the Plus Local page and was able to get the URL restored. I’ll be writing a blog post about this today. It appears that Google is disallowing edits made to Plus Local pages – so that the information (i.e. url/phone #) is not listed. In this case, I just logged into Google, accessed the local plus page via the listings and added the info, which then was accepted and is now showing in Places listings.
Maybe it helps Google to get clicks to the actual profile page, instead of the website, where it doesn’t have adds
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