Having issues claiming a Google+ Business page (phone number not associated with business address)

[DCochrane]

When attempting to claim my Google+ account, it asks for the phone number. When I enter the number listed on my business listing, it says that number cannot be found... It then tells me to re-enter all my business info. If I do this, will I lose all my existing photos, videos etc.?

Has anyone found this?

[stevefidelity]

For me, it's been a good year since I've been able to enter a phone number at that first stage and the system has actually pulled the business that corresponds with that number.

You're talking about losing your existing photos & videos, so that makes it sound like have already set up a Google+ Local page/Google Places page. So why are you going through the process of creating a new one?

[DCochrane]

The issue we are having is that when we go to claim & manage the page it asks us to enter the phone number of the business which was already on the old Google Places page.. now converted to Google+ page. When we enter the phone number an error pops up saying that this phone number isn't associated with any previously entered Google Places address so its prompting us to create a new page.

However we do not want to create a new page we want to manage the old page which has all our videos & such which were previously posted on the  Google Places page.

We don't want to lose all our stuff by creating a new page. INCLUDING reviews.

Also, At times we have had issues with some of our reviews not being accessible once the page was converted to a + page.

Has anyone else had either of these issues?

Thanks so much!

[stevefidelity]

Have you previously claimed a Google Places page for the business?

[DCochrane]

Yes. All the Google Places pages were claimed and now its asking us to claim the Google+ version... which is weird in my opinion. Shouldn't we just have control over it as it was previously claimed?

[stevefidelity]

Yes. If you've already claimed it, you just need to log into the Google account you used to initially create the account and you can make changes there.

[DCochrane]

Yes. That's what has happened in the past. Once we've claimed it we were able to manage it. However it is doing what I explained above. We aren't able to manage it.

I'm wondering if anyone else has been having this issue & if they know what could be potentially causing this error.

Thanks

[MiriamEllis]

Hi StrathcomMedia,

I'll answer the easier part of your question first, regarding missing reviews. Unfortunately, Google's handling of reviews has been one of the weakest aspects of their participation in Local. I could link you to thousands of posts and threads on this from the past half decade, but rather than do that, I'll just link to this recent post by Mike Blumenthal describing the current issues with reviews in Google+ Local:

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/07/30/google-local-and-review-issues/

My advice to you about reviews and Google is that you should immediately copy any review you get because it's quite possible it will disappear at some point, at which point, you can put the copied review on your own website as a testimonial.

Now to the more complex part of your question: your difficulties claiming your Google+ Local page. What is the exact error message you are getting. Please, copy it here and I will return to this thread. Thanks!