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Earlier this month, Google pushed out a new design for the Google Places dashboard, which is only available to U.S. businesses right now.
The issue is, if you are an SEO that helps businesses get listed on Google Maps, and you are not based in the United States - things may get sticky.
Specifically, since the dashboard currently only works for U.S. based businesses - if you try to add a U.S. based business but you are doing so from outside of the U.S. it will give you a hard time.
A Canadian SEO has a client in the U.S. he said that while he was creating the business listing he said that although the United States was selected as the Country (it's the only option), there wasn't any option to select a State and Zip code. It only offered up Canadian Provinces and postal codes.
Here is a picture he posted of the issue:
Derek from Google said he discovered a bug with the system and gave him some advice. He wrote:
You've exposed an issue with the new dashboard that we're working on resolving. In the meantime, you'll only be able to add US listings with the account you referenced, since it has accessed the new dashboard via the US, and the new dashboard only supports US listings at the moment. You should also only access the dashboard via a US IP in order to avoid issues like the screenshot you sent.If you wish to add and verify a location in Canada, you should use a different account that has exclusively accessed our tools via Canadian IPs.
Thanks for working through this with us.
Forum discussion at Google Business Help.
Comments:
Link Worx Seo
04/14/2013 12:39 pm
It would seems Google has launched several new products, which is great; but several of these product launches are causing several errors or are just broken period. Not sure why these high paid talented people are launching products that are not ready. Seems like the testing department should be testing more and the push to launch new products should be slowed down a tad. Now, I understand there are a lot of areas to cover with such large products and there will be bugs now and then, but to totally exclude this kind of option for non U.S. locations. Not a good start for the new Google Dashboard.
Ben Guest
04/15/2013 03:03 am
Google is only doing it the Microsoft way. Why QA things with a team of say 10 when you can QA with a million users?
Iain Bartholomew
04/15/2013 10:23 am
Is it only me who finds this kind of geo-restriction absurd? The world is so small now.