The Joys of Google Places/Plus/Local/Gaps

[Jo Shaer]

Oh, the joy of seeing your new client's previously 'does not support this location' Places listing suddenly appear in the 7 pack without affecting his existing organic listing.

And the feeling of horror as you notice that the website it is actually linked to is the .co.uk version when he has the .com

Followed by the feeling of doom as you realise that you did not have a senior moment and that the website being quoted in the listing is different to the one YOU completed in the dashboard...

Then the joy as you discover that client owns both version of website so you can forward and fix

But the stalking sense of foreboding because you know that Google must be scraping that info from somewhere else - even if you can't find it - and it may yet come back to bite you on the bum properly...

 

[Colan Nielsen]

This is great Jo. You should tell more of these stories. I felt like I was on an emotional roller-coaster Very captivating.

 

[AndyWPP]

HI Jo,

do you know why it would say "We currently do not support the location" when selecting "reviews" in the "reply to reviews" section of the dashboard? Other than that my clients listing seems fine with no issues.

thank you

 

[Colan Nielsen]

HI Jo,

do you know why it would say "We currently do not support the location" when selecting "reviews" in the "reply to reviews" section of the dashboard? Other than that my clients listing seems fine with no issues.

thank you

Do you also get the WCDNSTL message when you click "view" from the dashboard? Or just when you click the "reviews" link?

 

[AndyWPP]

Yes, i do.

---------- Post Merged at 10:01 AM ---------- Previous Post was at 09:58 AM ----------

when searching locally, the listing does show.

 

[Marie Ysais]

My heart was rising and sinking with you!! Did you pull any of your hair out??!! We should get stress pay for this type of work!!

 

[Linda Buquet]

My heart was rising and sinking with you!! Did you pull any of your hair out??!! We should get stress pay for this type of work!!

LOL Marie, I totally agree. Sorry about the ups & downs Jo, can totally relate.
Really should not be this hard.

Sorry I'm sick and still half asleep but I just had kind of a weird analogy pop into my head about local and why it's so crazy and unpredictable. We know how Google scrapes data from everywhere and then tries to reconcile it on the backend, then who knows what is going to show up on the front end? She's reconciling billions of pieces of data all the time, that can totally shift our listing data and search results.

The picture I just got in my head is watching a bottle float in the ocean. What direction that bottle goes in and where it will land is dependent on so many different factors. High tide, low tide, currents, undertow... Even a Tsunami on the other side of the world could affect the tide that pushes that bottle one direction or the other.

Then of course some day our bottle could end up, all washed up or stuck in the weeds...
Then when we find it we see there's a "do not support location error" note inside the bottle.

 

[Wade]

The "We do not support this location" message in the dashboard is about to lose me a client. I've discussed this with Places support and they swear it is a technical issue that will be corrected. They suggest that I continually update the information on both the google+ page and the Places account which will some how fix the technical issue in the Dashboard. Of course I can't ask the important question, why are neither showing up in local results when they used to.

It is encouraging that the message finally went away and the listing is showing up, although the stress of it being another listing isn't fun. Anything you did to help speed this process?

 

[Jo Shaer]

Wade, I completely redid his original listing, removed any custom categories, made sure he was an SAB with a radius location. And then I reported the issue. They came back within a couple of days to acknowledge and a couple of days again to say it was fixed.

That's when I noticed that the website was wrong! However, at least he did own the other website so I have now managed to work out how to forward. Hopefully, that will continue to work.

Marie, I have not pulled hair out but I'm sure it's going grey and I definitely have more wrinkles than when I first started doing this!

Linda, I too had thought of the bottle in the tide! I have another client who is struggling to get Google to recognise his address. His listing in our town remains on the front page but trying to rank for the county is up and down like a yoyo. One day he's there, the next day he isnt. Then he's back and then gone again. Today he seems to be ranking but he is at least beginning to understand the mercurial nature of Local. We just get so many clients who say 'But I've always ranked front page for blah in blah', what's going on and why can't you fix it!

Today, Google seems to have decided that my own business category is Computers! God knows where that has come from as I have spent the afternoon checking out my citations to see if I chose that as a category somewhere and come up empty handed. I just hope no one rings up asking for hardware advice and gives me a bad review as a result... :O

Colan, thank you - although I'm rather hoping to get off the rollercoaster and find a client who has an address that Google recognises, a store front that people can visit and five default categories that fit his products/services

AndyWPP, hope you can get to the bottom of it.