I don't really see the big deal. Hardly anyone ever went to the Google+ pages, other than SEOs and the business owners. They have made it virtually impossible to get to the page from the search results.
Photos, reviews, and About have just moved to Maps or the Local Finder, which we can consider the new home for our listing at Google. They want to separate G+ from local, and they have pretty much put the final nail in the coffin with this update. G+ is a now a social platform only, and no longer a local business listing site as well.
The impact I see is this:
- listing analysis and dupe discovery is a little harder for SEOs now
- We have to update the link we send people to to read/write reviews
- We have to update our links to our Google listing
I don't really mind. Google Plus just becomes less and less important for local search and we'll focus on the data we see in Maps, Map Maker, and the Local Finder.
From the perspective of both a business operator and SEO I thoroughly agree with Darren above.
From its earliest development we put time into google + for our smb's. We never saw even marginal responsiveness from customers. It simply didn't grow into the customer base. It grew among google fans and for acct management purposes. We never saw the response.
Similarly we never saw positive response for our little local smb's from twitter, foursquare or some other reasonably popular social venues. For one type of smb that is pretty responsive to visuals we've seen "some response" from pinterest, but even that is minimal. On the largest web social venue we've seen response from facebook--> still a minimal value to business and revenues compared to search. Frankly Bing is better for business than FB. Bing is involved in search and gives responses when visitors search using intent.
Our best source of "local" "social elements" are the great variety of social elements unique to local communities. It could be local list serves, it could be meet-ups, it could be local media or hyper local media, it could be locally strong blogs, it could be the news in local community, community interest groups, or church or civic groups....but it most assuredly are not the world wide web sources and certainly not google plus (+).
So Google Local is now a function of search and maps, sort of like it was before google plus.
I'm guessing two reasons for this change or set of changes:
1. Traffic did not migrate to local businesses on G+. No activity. Google would know. We wouldn't. We had ZERO...let me repeat
ZERO ability to really track and understand traffic to G+ and ultimate potential traffic to become a customer or a repeat customer.
Google uniquely sees what is occurring and they didn't communicate to us well enough for us to understand.
So they killed it. (so it seems).
2. A second reason. It could auger changes to further monetize google. Why??? because that is what google does!!!!
Frankly after messing around with G+, twitter, FB, and countless social venues...we like sticking to search. It works.
