You may have noticed some recent changes in the way your Google Places listings are displaying in Google. As Google announced on 30 May, this is because Google are effecting a shift from traditional Google Places listings to Google+ local listings. Essentially, Google Places will soon be rendered entirely redundant.

Google have advised that local places listings are still maintained via the standard Google Places administration panel for the moment until such time as Google+ business pages are integrated with the new Google+ local listings. Google haven’t announced when that is likely to take place although we are monitoring the situation and will keep you informed. For further reading see this post by Google here: http://googleandyourbusiness.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/helping-people-discover-and-share-local.html and this post regarding local search ranking factors in 2012: http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml. Please contact us for further information on local SEO.