You can see from the Adwords on the right that they do in fact know my location is in Lakewood, Colorado.  So what gives?  Other than a bug / coding error on Google’s part there’s really no explanation.

What’s the most interesting Google Local Blooper you’ve seen?

Since I had been in the top 3 of the 10 pack for several keywords and after the substitution had fallen out completely I got busy working to correct the situation and that’s where it went from bad to worse.  After I successfully claimed the listing and changed the number I had to do some editing.  The new listing had no categories, no description etc.

To my surprise, after filling all of the information out I returned to the dashboard to see this:

I’ve created a lot of listings for clients and my own businesses and never run across this before, but my instinct was to adopt a wait and see attitude.  Since I knew there wasn’t anything wrong with the listing I figured it was in some sort of queue at Google that a human would come around and check it and see there wasn’t anything wrong with it and would lift the flagged status. When a few days had gone by and there had been no change I started looking to see who else had, had this problem.  Not surprisingly, I found that Mike Blumenthal had reported on the problem based on a post in the Google Support forums.

The solution posits that the listing has banned words and that this causes the problem and that removing these corrects the problem.  Mike had a slightly different theory.  He thought that listings which got flagged might be running into an issue with too many characters in a certain field as this has been a known problem. It turns out the problem may be neither.

I would suggest that the problem is a bug in the code.  That Google has not commented on it because they don’t know where in the code the bug is coming from and they therefore can’t fix it.  Non programmers find it hard to believe that this kind of thing can occur but ask a programmer, it happens all the time.

So how did I come to my conclusion?  I tried removing the majority of the text in the description of my listing leaving just the line “We’re a small business search engine marketing company.”  I returned to the dashboard to a changed notice.  My listing was no longer flagged it was now awaiting an update.  I should mention at this point that even before I removed anything from the description I was under the allowed 200 characters having used only 189, so it wasn’t a problem of too many characters in this field.

The next thing I did leads me to my theory that this is a bug which Google may know exists but hasn’t been able to find.  I put the exact same text that had originally been there back in and submitted the listing yet again.  And the result.

My recommendation is that you try removing all but a line of your description.  Then, assuming you were happy with your listing as it was you put your original text back and submit again.

Of course this should just be the tip of the iceberg for the dashboard and the stats you should be able to get.  While they include which keywords lead to how many impressions, they do not give the far more valuable statistic of which keywords lead to which actions and how many of which actions.  Obviously they have this data and it is difficult to understand why they aren’t including it, when they know how valuable that would be to small businesses.

In addition to leaving out critical data, they also have not given a clear enough explanation of how they’re measuring data.  Since they now include a 10 pack in their organic listings for certain terms even without a modifier (e.g. if you search the term plumber without a geographical modfier you’re still likely to get a 10-pack listing in the universal search) it would be nice to know if they’re including these results in your local business center dashboard.

Lets hope that they offer more data and more clarificaiton in the near future.  In the meantime you can read more on what Google has to say about the new dashboard here.

But if you’re in the U.K.  you might see:

In announcing the international launch of Google Suggest Google states “We’ve localized our suggestions to account for various cultural and local factors…”  they go on to say that “users in different countries will get suggestions that feel natural.”

With any luck this is only the start of the improvements they will be making to this feature which they launched back in August.    While Google says it has “localized” the suggestions what they’ve really done is internationalized the suggestions to not be so US centric.  No doubt this is a move in the right direction, but hopefully they won’t stop here.    Google could and should offer true localization to narrow the geographical reach of these results to a much smaller area.  Dreaming a little bit further it would be great if Google added the ability through a drop down to narrow search on a country, state or city level.

These guys even look truly local, as in you can go to the street view and find buildings with signs for their shops on them.  And they aren’t of the ilk who have 11,000 plus listings or even 1,100 plus listings.

All of that looked pretty positive and I thought that given the hammering that Google has been getting  in blogs from security to   local search experts they might actually be doing something different.  Then I looked at another city on the other side of the country and it turns out to be a fluke.  It’s impossible to say if Google is testing something with the NYC listings,  manually cleaned those up because of so much focus on that city or…. There are dozens of possible reasons for the results, but based on Portland’s 10-pack today one thing is sure, they’ve made no sweeping changes to clean up the problem.  And Davis Lock and Safe has fallen victim  to the spammers with a hijacked listing.   If you call the number in the 10-pack you get the spam company if you call the number on their Website 503-766-3814 you get a very pleasant employee.

Call most of these Portland listings and you’ll here one of the same three answers you hear across the country when you dial up a locksmith “Service” “Locksmith” “You’ve reached the mobile emergency line.”   When I called the one for DavisLocks.com as its listed in the local listings the guy had no idea where Beaverton (Davis is in Beaverton) was.  What was clear was that he had no connection to Davis but could based on a zip code send a locksmith out if I needed one.  Luckily I didn’t.  I then called the number off their Website and that’s when I spoke to the real company.

Portlanders beware.

Google, you have not solve the problem as you claim

Hat tip goes to Nathan who commented that I had left this image out of my earlier post Locksmiths Crack Google Local.  I highly suggest the interactive tour where you can find out which locksmiths have their shops in the middle of Central Park and who the only locksmith is at JFK.  Even if Google is flunking out of local they still have some great street views for their maps.

SearchEngineOptimizationLocal.com is ranking for a number of cities + search engine optimization and their listing shows the importance of  some factors while calling into question the importance of others.  Here’s the listing and below that the surprising landing page.

And here’s the landing page.

What this suggests is that the most important ranking factors claimed by Mihm et.a:

1)  General importance of claiming Local Business Listing
2)  LBL address in city of search
3)  Proper Categorization of LBL
4) Product / service KWs in LBL title

Are indeed the most important factors and everything else is secondary and in some sectors completely unnecessary.

There’s one more interesting thing about their listings and it can be seen in the San Diego listings above do you see it?  I’ll let this go for a little while and see if anyone comes up with the winning answer.  It’s very apparent so there’s no trick here.  Good luck.