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Hi AvalanceSearch, Great questions. Let me address them in order. Personally, I'm not a fan of taking advantage of Google's offer to let partners in a practice build their own Google+ Local pages in addition to the main practice page. My hesitation stems from two things - Google's historic issues with merging similar listings and Google's historic refusal to delete doctor/dentist dupes (read: http://localsearchforum.catalystemarketing.com/google-duplicates-merges/861-dr-dupes-google-local-user-edits.html) That being said, it is certainly permissible to go this way, just so as you have a sense of historic problems that could potentially come up for clients. It's fine to have a different name and same address in the multi-partner scenario. But, if you can, do give each partner a different phone number at which they can be directly contacted during stated business hours. The main reason for doing so is to lessen the chances of merged listings. Yes, definitely point an individual practitioner's citations to his unique page on the website. Again, this helps reduce the likelihood of merges and provides a better user experience. Hope this helps!

Hi Avalanche, If it happened automatically, then it does sound like part of the automatic upgrade. I do, however, recommend that you investigate and resolve the business title inconsistency. Google's guidelines specifically forbid anything but the legal business name or DBA in that field. If an internal edit doesn't work, I'd go through the troubleshooter: https://support.google.com/places/ Hit the red 'contact us' button to begin documenting the problem, which is quite a serious one, both because of Google's guidelines and the fact that citation consistency is considered to be one of the top local ranking factors. Hope this helps!

The problem with making it transparent is that you would lose 25% or so of the image which means you would still have to add some design to it (ie. making your picture offset or something)  The way it is now you can just add a photo and you're done.  No editing or Photoshop skills required.  I just think it's too 'blocky' (thanks for the verification on that word) and think the 'info card' should be just a slightly bigger size or something to make it work better.  You should be able to customize your background color for the 'text card' too.  I think it would work better with branding. https://plus.google.com/+LaBovick/ has their image fade at the bottom and the 'info card' to the left is a little longer and it looks nice that way.  If Google could make this sort of design default I think it would look a lot better.  Maybe even have the menu fit in that negative space below the image and to the right of the 'info card'. Unfortunately I don't work at Google anymore so I'll just build a template to make it work.  Either way it's much better then the old style.