Welcome to the Q&A Forum

There is no telling what they will do with the page you replaced it with but I would put my money on the new optimized page doing better than the category page ever did.  You should have more content value on the new page.  Category pages are often linked to so I would run a link report on the old URL and try to get some of those links to change the page they are linking to. Since you are using WP, I would also consider adding a category specific loop on the page that took the category page. This would be a big help to users and show some good relevance to the search engines.

Thanks Miriam. Good to know it's common in the local field. Thought this might have caused problems , maybe my listing dropping in position but it hasn't. I'll keep my eye out for  any further developments

The link form Stephen to Search Engine Land is a good resource.  I'll just add a few additional thoughts here: 1.  There are several types of domains that you might be picking up - and they are not all equal.  There are 'pre-release' domains which are auctioned off about a month after they've expired.  These are the kind you get from GoDaddy Auctions or Namejet.  If you buy those - the creation date is not actually reset - so a 10 year old domain would still be 10 years old.  During this period of time, the existing owner of the domain could actually re-register the domain as well. After this, domains go through the 'Redemption Period' and then the 'Pending Delete' period.  These domains will be completely deleted from the registry, and have their creation dates reset. You're much more likely to get some 'juice' from PreRelease names, than names that have completely dropped from the registry. 2.  That said, if you're still considering this technique, you'd probably want to look very carefully at the backlinks of the site you're buying.  A large portion of the expired domains with backlinks were used for spamming.  It's probably not worth your time to disavow all of the bad links from a domain you've picked up at auction. 3.  Expired domains can be 'rehabbed'.  If you take the time to rebuild the site with valuable content, it will be able to rank for search terms, and build up page rank again.  You'd probably have much less risk in the long run by rehabbing some related domains with good content and linking back to your main site, than using the 301 technique - though I've never done any side by side experiments to say for sure.

Take every 301 redirect you can get.  There may be link equity which is unitilsed there.

Be patient Sam, you don't want to do too much too soon raising more flags with Google. As long as you're getting good citations for your places listing, it should be a matter of time before you regain your position. Since you did have the top positions in the past i'm assuming you followed all the best practices to optimize your places listing.

Thanks everyone for your contribution to my question.