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Thanks very much for this, was really helpful! I've been through my listings and found that my copy could be seen as a little spammy, so I've made it much more neutral and blank. I'm hopeful this will cure it! Thanks for your time and expertise

Thanks for making the point that Google would hire more to take care of backlog - hadn't thought of this (derp!) and helped me eliminate this from investigation. Thanks!

Hi SEO experts:

We've been successfully placing our clients into Google Places until a few weeks ago - since then, they've all come up as Pending. They're all genuine business with bricks-and-mortar addresses the postcards have been sent to (they're all lovely people too, although I guess that won't have a massive effect) with some directory citations to back them up.

Could I please get peoples' opinions as to why this has changed?

My own opinions are:

a) Google's been inundated with requests which are taking a while to process:

b) an algo update is holding approvals up:

c) a consistent IP for all our clients is raising a spamflag.

What do you reckon, SEO friends? Help me save the hair I haven't yet torn out!

Ben

SB Web Consulting