My Google places Listing doesn’t work!
The Online Marketing world has been wrestling for several months with the introduction of Google Places.
The Google Places help forum(help would be in inverted commas as you will find yourself mainly talking to yourself in there) has been flooded with desperate business owners struggling to find a solution to why their Google Places listing is not showing or is not ranking or more importantly is being rejected because it infringes Google’s guidelines. The guidelines are in some places quite clear and in others as transparent as mud, which has led to a massive vacuum of information regarding reasons behind the Google Places Problems. The main issues have been
- The use of Categories. This has been an area that Google have changed their policy on at least twice which has confused a lot of business owners.
- The fact that the Google Places system is set up as a medium for a business to have one listing, so businesses with say 3 offices but under the same business name have faced rejection.
- The Google Places rejection algorithm seems to take into account past rejections so will not allow listings to pass if they have a history of previous rejections without a manual review which can take several months.
- It would seem as a result of a lot of people trying to usurp the system, listing a landline phone number instead of a diverting phone number eg 1800 number or a tracking phone number, is the safest way to go to avoid rejection.
- If a business has citations eg the yellow pages elsewhere on the internet those citations need to list the same phone number and address that the website and the places listing includes, having a mismatch of phone numbers will cause a problem.
- If your address is in an office building where other businesses have a similar address perhaps even in a similar line of work then this may cause a problem as Google finds 2 businesses listing the same address and different phone numbers in a similar industry leading to rejection.
Troubleshooting Google Places has become a test of second guessing a long list of potential areas of conflict, the above are just a few of such areas, beyond this Google Places Optimisation has now become vital to give your business that operates in a particular geographic area, a fair share of the endless flow of leads that Google generates every day.
