Google Places Bug Alert: Your Name No Longer Exists

Update: At roughly 10:00 am EST it appears to have been fixed.

Last night I went to bed with my blog post about the new Places hotel booking feature in the bag thinking life was under control and all was good in Google Places land. Hah!

I awake to an email from Matt Tengler of allLocal alerting me to a bug the size of the cockroach that ate Tokyo.

Every Places Page business name has been replaced with their address. The bug is not showing on the main serps or in Places search, only on the Places page:

Related posts:

  1. Google Places Search: Hiding Address No Longer Buries Listing
  2. Google Places – Reviewer Names No Longer Showing. Feature or Bug?
  3. Where Are Google Places Pages Going? To the Index?

Where Is A Business Address That is Hidden Not Really Hidden? Google Places

Last March, Google introduced the ability to hide the address for at home and service businesses that do not want clients driving to their locations. At the time, the feature, while useful, also managed to hide your business listing deep in the index. With the rollout of Places Search in October, the feature became more useful as your listing would now show on the new local organic blended results (although still not in the traditional 7-Pack).

One of the reasons that some SMB’s choose to hide their address is that they don’t want the security risk of exposing their home address. Be warned however, that there is “leakage” in the data and it is still possible to find the actual address and or business at that address even if the feature to hide it is selected in your Places Dashboard.

Justin Blase, an SEO in the St. Paul area sent along these screen shots showing just some of the ways that the data can be surfaced for a “hidden” address:

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There are other Google vectors that display this information so be alert. If your purpose for choosing to use the feature is security you are deluding yourself. You not only won’t show on traditional 7-Pack results (a pretty big penalty) but there is no real security.

Related posts:

  1. Google Places Search: Hiding Address No Longer Buries Listing
  2. How to change your Business Address in the Internet Age
  3. An Internet Change of Address Guide

Local Search Tools For the SMB and Professional

I have been using two “new” local search tools of late and have been impressed with both of them.

The Local Search Toolkit from seOverflow has recently been released from beta and upgraded to work with the many changes that occurred recently in Google Places. The tool provides competitive information for a range of information for the top 7 listings in a given geo search. It will provide both URLs and totals for each of the following: Site Title Tag, Categories, Citations, Reviews , Number of Photos, Number of Videos, whether the listing is Owner Verified and the listings Distance to City Center.

It’s free and provides a wealth of information. It’s useful for determining which reviews sites are most prevalent in which industries and which citations sources are the most prominent.

Another tool that I often use is the Whitespark Local Citation Finder. The free version has been around for a while and is also useful in finding citations for either keyword phrases, your own site or those of a competitor. They just released the Local Citation Finder Pro version. The Pro Version is $20/mo and normally I do not write about products that charge a fee but it has a new feature that I am finding incredibly useful (they provided me with a free subscription).

Local Citations Pro now offers the ability compare the specific citations between any number of  searches and or business listings. So for example you can examine your business listing and the citations for the listing that is tops in your category and against the citations for a series of search pharse. The information is offered up both visually and via a spread sheet file:

Local Citation Finder Pro

Pro users also get these other features:

  • Compare Citations
    Easily determine which citations your competitors have that you’re missing.
  • Sort by Value
    Sort your results by SEOmoz Domain Authority and Majestic SEO ACRank.
  • Get Results in Minutes (Not Hours)
    Pro users jump right to the front of the queue.
  • Export to CSV
    Use the LCF data in your client reports, etc.
  • 20 Searches per Day
    17 more than the 3 searches per day that free users get.

Another possible use for the comparison feature in the Pro version would be to track citation accumulation for a single listing over time.

Both products are incredibly useful tools in their free versions. While I have trouble envisioning spending the monthly fee for Local Citation Pro for a single business, the extra features are worth the expense if your are managing more than a few campaigns.

This article was updated at 12:40 PM

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