Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Local links are a lot better then international. Lower quality local links can bring you higher position then other ones. We experienced that with our 10 websites.

Hi Tracy, Excellent question, and one I'm sure many people are puzzled about. Google is going to merge the Google+ Business pages and Google+ Local pages in future. I think if you will read this post, you will feel brought up to date: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/06/08/google-for-business-places-forums-wrapup/ They have already begun merging the pages when manually requested to do so, as you can read about here: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/06/19/the-g-merge-has-started-google-now-processing-manual-merge-requests/ Hope these resources make it clear to you what has happened already and what is supposed to happen in future.