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Understanding Google My Business & Local Search

New Google Places For Business Listings Can Now Be Transferred to a New Owner via G+ Page Management

Update: 12:30: I have changed the title of the article from saying “Account” to “Listings” as what is being transferred is the G+ Page ownership NOT the account.

I learned the hard way this past week that a business listing in the new Google Places for Business Dashboard that has been upgraded to social functionality, is intimately tied to that social presence. Delete the social page and you delete the business listing forcing you to reclaim the listing. The upshot of this is once you go social you can’t go back. At least not without some aggravation.

Dan Pritchett, who plays a significant role in the dashboard development at Google, said this:

To be clear, with the new dashboard the G+ page and the listing are tightly associated. Every G+ Local page is backed by a listing and once you get a G+ Local page, your places listing is tied to it. Removing one always removes the other.

But like all Google “features” there is a flipside to this. Since the business listing is intimately associated with the social G+ page it’s ownership can now be transferred via the G+ Page ownership transfer option. This seems like a simple function and so self evident that one might ask why I am even writing about it. Despite the obvious nature of the feature, it has has never before been possible.

Again according to Dan who responded in the same G+ post:

Okay, just clarified, that once you have a G+ page, transferring ownership of the Local page also transfers ownership of the listing.

Obviously the steps necessary to being able to transfer a listing that is not yet social are probably more cumbersome than just deleting the listing from your account (again with not without some scary verbiage). But if the listing is already social then the process is relatively straight forward via the G+ interface. Here are the instructions:

Step 1 of 3 Make sure you’re using Google+ as your page.

Step 2 of 3 Click Managers associated with the page you’d like to transfer.

Step 3 of 3 Click the dropdown arrow on the card of the person and select Transfer ownership to _name of user_.

OK class. To summarize where and when one can transfer ownership of a listing. There may be a pop quiz later in the week.

  • If the business listing is in the new Google Places Dashboard AND the listing has been upgraded to the have social functionality, you can transfer it via the Google Pages ownership transfer technique.
  • If it is in the old dashboard it can be reclaimed by another account without the need for a transfer. Although leaving the listing in the old dashboard may impinge on your ability to leave review responses so you probably want to delete the listing from the old account.
  • If it is in the new dashboard but not yet social, it would need to be deleted and then reclaimed to effect a transfer

Now if Google would just have one solution, improve the language of these processes and offer some degree of granularity in the delete function, we might be getting someplace.