How to See ALL the Categories a G+ Page is Using

[JoyHawkins]

Darren Shaw just posted this amazing tip that is a huge time-saver.

How To Find All* The Categories on a Google+ Business Page | Whitespark

 

[CodyBaird]

Nice find Darren! Thanks for sharing Joy. I wonder why or if there is a reason for Google making it less than obvious to see categories.

 

[Dustybones]

That man has x-ray vision. Thanks Joy!

 

[Linda Buquet]

Could not post yesterday, but I'm confused about something...

Couldn't you always do this? I mean like the past 2 years??? Is the whole tip to just click to see the additional categories or is there something else I missed?

 

[Scott Rawlins]

I think you're right Linda. It's been around for awhile. However, I've noticed that sometimes you can do that to see the additional cats and other times, it's a link that gives you all the "dentists" or whatever cat in that area on maps.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Yes, true Scott. Always meant to try to figure out what triggered that diff.

Assume it's the way the page was created? Like if it was created in Places and manually merged or one of the various other ways? Maybe? Not sure.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Could not post yesterday, but I'm confused about something...

Couldn't you always do this? I mean like the past 2 years??? Is the whole tip to just click to see the additional categories or is there something else I missed?

Linda, it definitely was a feature going back to last year at some point. But it went away for several months.

This recent re-inclusion of the categories on the live page started at least a month or so ago. At least that's when I first noticed it.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Can't you do this with Mapmaker as well? Or do the Mapmaker categories have a flaw like slow to update, not complete, inaccurate, etc?

Good find no matter what Darren!

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Hi Joshua, the categories on Map Maker are always visible, so I don't think it would need a hack like this.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

Sorry, I meant doesn't MM show the exact same categories just like this? What is the advantage to using this over MM? Is MM less accurate, slow to update, etc?

 

[Colan Nielsen]

In my experience, MM doesn't always accurately reflect what is inside the GMB.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

In my experience, MM doesn't always accurately reflect what is inside the GMB.

Bingo, thanks Colan. Given then two options, would you use the GMB trick instead?

 

[Colan Nielsen]

If I was troubleshooting I would always use both methods. The old one-two.

 

[JoshuaMackens]

If I was troubleshooting I would always use both methods. The old one-two.

Mmm. Tastes good!

 

[Myles Bergh]

As Linda mentions, this functionality has been around for a while. If the business had two or less categories, they were highlighted as a hyperlink and clicking on the category would take you to a local search of businesses in the area. If there were more than two categories for the business, clicking on the category would bring you to the list of all categories (similar to today). Each category in the list was clickable and linked to a local search of businesses in the area for that category.

It appears the links to the local searches have been removed regardless if you have one category or several. The only feature that remains is revealing the additional categories.

 

[noahlearner]

I too read Darren's post only to see that his technique no longer worked. I decided to do a quick post showing in a deeper way how to use google map maker to find categories. You can check it out at Learner Design

Cheers!