Google is slowly moving towards a G+ local world where there will be two types of G+ Pages for local; claimed and unclaimed.

There will be subtle differences between the claimed pages depending on owner configuration (social or no, video or no, owned by a person or a company) but all G+ Pages for local that are claimed will have the same options available to them. Whew… this reality has been a long time coming but with the recent rollout of the “auto-merge” capability we can start to see the “end game” for these pages (as if Google works with end games).

In the meantime there is a transition going on and many G+ Pages for both in the US and internationally are caught in some intermediate state; old dashboard, new dashboard without social, merged social page with old dashboard etc. It’s important to understand the state because some things are possible in one situation and not in another and some bugs seem to be a function of what the page is and how it was created. For example a business claimed into the old dashboard can be reclaimed by another account but one claimed into the new dashboard can not. That has implications for all sorts of situations now and in the future.

To help you clarify the status of any give page from the outside view I have written a new blog past at Local U to help clarify (yea right clear like mud) the situation :  What Kind of Google+ Page Is It? – A Visual Guide to Google+ Local Pages.