Category: Google Maps

Google My Business has this Q&A feature where people can ask question and others can answer those questions directly on a business local listing. The character limit for the answer was 1,000 characters but now it seems to have dropped to 440 characters.

Looks like reviews being added to Google Maps business listings are being delayed for some reason. There are numerous complaints about this both in the Local Search Forums and the Google My Business Help Forums.

We saw it coming for a couple months now and we even saw it start rolling out a few weeks ago. But now, Google announced that in Google Travel hotel results, the health and safety data is now available for searchers. And yes, this time I can replicate…

Joy Hawkins, a local SEO expert, has said she has seen a “large increase” in the number of hijacked Google My Business listings over the past couple of months. There is this large Google My Business Help thread with almost a hundred posts in it about …

I am not sure when this happened but it seems Google is now treating banks differently in the local results. The local pack would normally show reviews for banks, but now the reviews are missing. You can see them when you click into the detail listing…

Ben Fisher spotted that Google is now testing in Google My Business a status indicator of where your reinstatement request is. So if contact Google My Business for something, if you go back to the form, it might show the status of that request.
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It seems Google has another bug, this one is with how Google displays some products on the Google local panel. Claire Carlile posted some examples of the product carousel showing a product carousel that looks like it is missing information. Others are…

A couple of weeks ago we reported how the wait times that Google displayed in the local and maps results for restaurants were wrong. It showed long wait times for places that had zero wait time. Now, it seems to be resolved.

We now have some folks seeing the health and safety attributes that businesses have been able to add to their Google My Business listings back over a months ago, on the front end of Google’s search results Google Maps results.

Remember the days where you use to look at Google Maps to see how busy a place was before you went there? Oh you still do that, to make sure it is not busy at all because of the plaque? Well, it seems to be broken. Google wait times for restaurants …

A month ago, we reported how Google My Business added new health and safety attributes for businesses to add to their local listings. It seems google has been expanding the number of attributes for these businesses.

A month ago we reported that Google My Business is adding video conferencing integration to “connect in real-time, with video.” Well, it seems we are now seeing more details about that now in Google My Business, where some businesses can offer online …

It looks like Google is testing yet another, what would seem, powerful feature in Google My Business named Preview Call History. This feature seems to show you your recent calls made to you from Google Maps and Google Search via your Google local list…

Google has changed the maximum file size for the videos you can upload to your Google My Business profile from 100 MB in size down to 75 MB in size. Joy Hawkins was the first to spot this and said on Twitter “If you’re having issues uploading videos t…

Google announced new performance metrics, specifically for Google My Business Insights. Now, this is probably what we covered over here. Google said “business Profile Performance reporting is moving closer to your profile on Search and Maps. You’ll b…

Over the past couple of weeks Google has been making updated to its guidelines around service area businesses (SABs) and virtual offices in terms of their Google My Business use. Joy Hawkins documented a lot of the changes but here is a short summary….

Google seems to have added a message button to the “updates” section of the Google Local panel view. So these are where you can add updates through Google Posts on local, but there is a message button there for a customer to ask you questions about th…

Google has slightly updated the document on the local ranking factors, specifically the section around how reviews impact local rankings. The change was from “will probably improve” to “can improve” local rankings in the document.

Google announced yesterday is made some updates to its Google Shopping options for nearby queries. The goal is to make you feel safer when buying from local stores. Google will let you filter the results to show nearby shops and then it clearly shows…

If you login to your Google My Business account, click on your insights and check your photo views analytics, you will see that it is stuck at August 31st. No new data is shown in that report after August 31, 2020. This seems like a widespread issue …