Google Places Is Over, Company Makes Google+ The Center Of Gravity For Local Search

[ed.brooks]

Search Engine Land Reports: Google Places Is Over, Company Makes Google+ The Center Of Gravity For Local Search
" As of this morning roughly 80 million Google Place pages worldwide have been automatically converted into 80 million Google+ Local pages, according to Google’s Marissa Mayer."

 

[ed.brooks]

Please note that I'm still seeing old-style places pages when I search for car dealers.

 

[joe.pistell]

I took a quick look, someone tell me if I am wrong...

does this require a google+ login to see all the goodies?

Or...

Do they use the Google+ local goodies as bait to create a google+ accnt?

Former = FAIL
Latter = WIN

 

[kevinfrye]

Search Engine Land Reports: Google Places Is Over, Company Makes Google+ The Center Of Gravity For Local Search
" As of this morning roughly 80 million Google Place pages worldwide have been automatically converted into 80 million Google+ Local pages, according to Google’s Marissa Mayer."

Great news - though I am not seeing the changes in our local search engine results yet. Hope to see in the upcoming days.

 

[kevinfrye]

I can only see the results right now if I am in Google+ and select it on the left hand side. I still see the same merge issues that occur with Google Places, so I am curious if there will be an easier way to resolve this. Beyond that, how are they determining the Zagat star rating?

 

[ibdefaria]

I like the integration with G+ layout, but I don't see it yet how it affects my G+ account. It would be nice if I could save places or place them into circles. That way I could get updates on the business I like. If it worked that way, it would be a nice place for dealers to announce deals. However I can see how some people would abuse the system and post deals every 5 minutes.

 

[joe.pistell]

Insights:

It’s Finally Here: Chronicling the Plus-Places Merge | Mihmorandum
"....Read the message that Google is now displaying in the Places Dashboard carefully:

Read that again. ”We hope to make it easier for our users to discover your business and share it…” NOT “we hope to make it easier for you, the business owner, to interact with your customers” or anything along those lines."​

 

[joe.pistell]

Insights:

Google Places Pages Are No More – But What has Changed? | Understanding Google Places & Local Search
"...There is no doubt that Google is integrating (slowly) Places with the social backbone and the single login logic of their update. There has also been a trend away from highlighting the stand alone Place page…"

 

[yagoparamo]

Nothing in WA that I can see yet.

 

[Bill Simmons]

I can only see the results right now if I am in Google+ and select it on the left hand side. I still see the same merge issues that occur with Google Places, so I am curious if there will be an easier way to resolve this. Beyond that, how are they determining the Zagat star rating?

Kevin, I found this article that tries to explain the rating system.
https://support.google.com/local/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1723748&p=zagat_score

This particular article uses restaurants as an example. For other types of business, they offer this quote at the end of the article:
"When we don’t have enough user ratings on different aspects, we will just show an overall score. An overall score is comparable to a score in the primary aspect for a location, like food for restaurants."

The score for my dealership is a 21 out of 30, which puts us in the "very good to excellent" category.