If you play in the Local arena at all, you’ve probably seen the new Google Plus update and freaked out along with the rest of us. The redesign has completely dumped every “local” element, leaving marketers and business owners scratching their heads.
Various blog posts and forum discussions popped up, with everyone freaking out about lamenting the updates. Is the update still in beta? Will any elements be added back? What about reviews? Where in the world *IS* Carmen Sandiego?
Thanks to a recent post on the Google Advertiser Communities site from Matma B., we now know that Local pages are no longer a part of Google Plus, and the following features are no longer supported:
Reviews (more on this in a minute)
Stars
Categories
Directions
Photo uploads
Interior photos
Maps
Hours
Opentable/app integration
The change isn’t all that surprising, considering how Google has slowly been decoupling Google Plus from all of its different properties. Most Local SEO experts agree this won’t have much (if any) impact on the general public. The only people who ever really visited Google Plus pages were business owners and SEOs.
The general public will now interact with your local business information either in the knowledge box on the right side of brand searches or on the new Local Finder page (after clicking on a 3-pack result). Your new Google business listing page is simply your Google Maps listing.
How To Give Customers A Link For Reviews
The only real shakeup with this update is the fact that the links we’ve been using for customer reviews will be broken. Since reviews aren’t a part of the Google Plus experience anymore, you can’t send customers there to leave reviews. Even worse, everyone’s favorite auto-pop-up-review-box trick (adding &review=1 to the URL) doesn’t work anymore, either.
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