At the last Local U Advanced we were fortunate to have two Googlers present; Joel Headley of Customer Support and Dan Pritchett, the lead engineer on the new Google Places for Business Dashboard. The environment was very open (with cameras and tweets off) and it was an incredible opportunity to get questions answered about Google Local. I picked up a few very interesting tidbits during these sessions that I can share.

– Custom Categories are going away. Except in the bulk upload environment where they can still be used (hmmm).

– The new Google Places for Business Dashboard had a recently imposed 25 business limit. But Dan Pritchett, hearing the sigh of dismay in the room, returned to Mt View and had the limit upped to 100. (wow)

– As a result of this inquiry I learned (since I don’t deal with very many service area businesses) that SABs can not use the bulk upload tool and are relegated to having to claim each listing (Thanks to Linda Buquet). Thus the 25 business limit meant endless account creation for SABs with 100 listings or more. And still does if you have more than 100. (grr)

– During LocalU I received an inquiry from a local SEO that wanted to report some spammy service area businesses but as you may or may not know, since SABs have been pulled out of MapMaker, the report a problem link does not work. The solution? (thanks to Keenan Glass for this tip.) Search for the business on the main page results and click on the “Feedback” link at the bottom of the Knowledge panel. This sends reports directly to the Google quality team rather than into MapMaker. (cool)

– Joel noted during the presentation and reiterated via post yesterday: “if you’re calling my support team for verification, have the listing’s account email posted somewhere on the website of your business”. Thus if the account is under a generic gmail account instead of the domain email Google can verify that the listing actually belongs to the account. This protects both the account holder and Google and provides them with one more tool to resolve disputes. Worried about spam? Put the information on an obscure page that isn’t indexed and as an image. (nice to know)

– And for those of you NOT in the US – Google announced that the the new Places for Business dashboard will be rolling out to new users in the following countries: Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Norway, Croatia, Finland, Singapore, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein. (Liechtenstein?)

-Not related to LocalU but the link at the bottom of the 7-pack has returned although now it goes to Maps view with the list and not to the Places search (egads…what happens when you have the new Maps?)

– I also made an inadvertent discovery  as  how to allow for Google reviews on the iPhone and iPad. (Let me know via email if you need this information).

-Those that attended LocalU noted how refreshing and useful it was to actually hear from Google themselves about the realities of Local. In fact at both SMX Advanced and LocalU applause broke out spontaneously several times when the discussion of Google local support came up. Now thats a change. (Its about time. Nice to see Google finally growing up. 🙂 )

The joke was that perhaps some day soon Matt Cutts would be referred to as the Joel Headley of Web Search.

And the required caveat: Google is one of the sponsors of LocalU (although not this one).