Google Business Forum VIDEO Wrapup - October 5, 2012

[Linda Buquet]

Catch the latest updates from the Google and your Business Forum.
Jade just posted a new wrap up with several good tips and updates.​

Google and Your Business Forum Wrapup - October 5, 2012

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/9ci_sM2HWR4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
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0:01 Introduction

0:16 Listings take a week to go live, a few weeks for link from Google Places dashboard to work

0:40 Verified social pages now showing message if edit not accepted

0:59 Fewer categories displaying because uncommon categories no longer appearing

1:18 International phone number formatting issue with verified social pages

1:28 Formatting not appearing on owner descriptions

1:45 Google+ Local best practice: edit verified social pages via Google+

2:14 Forum tip: better mobile forum display, yay!

I have a couple things to add, please check back later for comments.

Any thoughts? Questions? Comments?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Posted the above on Saturday when most of you were out playing so you may have missed it.

Here are a couple comments I wanted to add.

"Fewer categories displaying because uncommon categories no longer appearing."

NOTE: In the video Jade suggests it may be better to change custom cats to default cats.

I think there are a variety of category issues going on. For awhile now, there are has been what I think is a separate issue of Google just hiding the additional cats from view on the G+ Local page, but they are still taken into account in the ranking algo.

See this thread for more. Google+ Local - Category Bug Bites Listings. All 5 cats are still there and you can see the cats with map search EVEN uncommon cats. It's just a display issue where on the G+L page they are only showing one, occasionally 2 of the 5.

PLUS she's changing cats a lot more often lately. SOMETIMES taking away the MAIN category like Plumber and replacing with something very UNCOMMON and bogus like "Plumbers' Merchant". (Which happened a week ago to a #1 ranking consulting client of mine who dropped like a rock.) (That cat replacement happened on lots of other plumbers too, not just this one, so I suspect it was a bad feed or something.)

So keep an eye on your cats!

My prediction is that the ability to pick cats at all will be going away and similar to G+ Local snippets and page title tag overwrites --- the 'all knowing' Google algo is just going to pick whatever she feels is best.

"Google+ Local best practice: edit verified social pages via Google+"
I've mentioned this a few times recently, but in case you missed it wanted to highlight again. I've seen a few problems come up in the forum that may have been related to editing in the Places dash after merge/verify of G+ Business page.