Ignoring This Email Could Cost You

by Jim February 12, 2014

A lot of our clients have been getting this email recently and we got our own last week.

Google Places Email
Google Places Email

Ignore it at your peril. Google places is going through a merge. It’s been happening since September 2013 and it seems to be finally hitting Australian shores. Originally this was described as an upgraded dashboard for your places account. This is a very welcome change as the old dashboard was indeed very clunky. However it’s a little more than a cosmetic interface upgrade. It’s the integration of Google Places with Google+ and if you ask Google employees they will tell you it is the merging of data between Maps, Places & Google+, well that’s what they have been telling us anyway. This is different to Google+ Local which was launched in May 2012.

A Messy Place Will Not Get Visits

Google has some dire warnings if your places account information is incomplete, including but not limited to, it may be deleted. This merge is primarily affecting businesses that have had a places account. All new places accounts automatically get the new dashboard.

It’s as buggy as hell right now

I’ve spoken with more than Google helpdesk employee, who has told me there are a lot of bugs in the system right now during this merge. All sorts of weirdness as you will see from today’s video. It’s important that you action this email if you get one though. Losing a places listing for some businesses could be mean losing a large chunk of their traffic. Here’s the explanation from Google what is happening. Here’s also a great blog by Mike Blumenthal that discusses a lot of the Places issues. Have you learned anything about places you want to share?

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