Google Local Business, Fix We currently do not support the location

Imagine that you have your business setup in Google under Google Places. Users from your town can search using location based queries to get your listing in the results or on Google Maps. Think Plumber Manhattan for instance. If you optimize the listing you usually have good chances to be at the top of the listing for user searches, which in turn drives great business to your website and Google Places listing.

One of the issues that businesses and webmasters who take care of the listing for businesses experience from time to time is the dreaded “We currently do not support the location”.

This basically returns a blank page with the error message instead of the businesses listing on Google Places. I actually experienced this message twice in the last three months for a client.

It can be a serious blow to the businesses operations if it is not found on Google Places anymore. One might now assume that this message appears on purposes because something’s wrong with the listing, or maybe even the Google account in question.

This is however often not the case. The We currently do not support the location seems to be a bug in Google Places that a lot of local businesses have experienced in the last time.

I do suggest you check the email account linked to your Google Account and your Google Webmaster Tools account first to see if you got any emails or warnings from Google. The next thing that you need to do is to open your Places listing in your Google Account to check for changes or messages there.

If everything appears all right, you can try the following solution to bring your local business listing back on Maps.

The fix that worked in my client’s case both times was to make a change to the Google Places listing. The easiest way to do that is to post an update. You find the “Share an update on your place page” on the right side of the Places listing.

Just enter an update into the form and hit the Share button afterwards. Write about a new product or special offer for instance. I had to wait about 15 minutes before the local business appeared again on Google Places. The We currently do not support the location message was gone.

You can also make other changes, like adding or removing text from the site’s description, business hours or categories. Make sure you do not change the businesses location or other information related to that.

I hope this helps some local businesses who are fighting with the same bug on Google Places.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Monday September 26, 2011 -
Tags:business, Google, google maps, google places, local business

Responses so far:

1. Nyagoslav says:

   September 26, 2011 at 10:36 am

   Hi Martin,

   This is a good workaround and I have written about it a few months ago (if you want I could provide the link).

   However, my point is that if someone decides to go the making changes way they should be careful not to change their business name, address or phone number, as this might cause a re-verification issue. Furthermore, it’s good not to fix the description as it will take a few weeks for it to reappear.

   Greetings,
   Nyagoslav

   Reply
   • Martin Brinkmann says:

     September 26, 2011 at 10:41 am

     Thanks for pointing that out. Just post your link, always good if it is a relevant addition.

     Reply
     • Nyagoslav says:

       September 26, 2011 at 11:02 am

       You can see it here: http://www.optilocal.org/google-places/a-few-ways-to-deal-with-google-places-problems/
2. Paul says:

   September 26, 2011 at 12:14 pm

   We are wholesalers of ladies clothes. We started 2 years ago and are slowly building up a list of stockists of our product. I thought Google places would be a good way of showing who and where the stockists were located. So I added their names to my Google places. However, Google have come back to say I do not have authorisation for these places. Clearly I don’t own the sites just supply them. Any ideas?

   Reply
3. abeens says:

   September 27, 2011 at 1:18 pm

   Should have tried this method but what I did was started submitting the location information to few other directories exactly as it was in Google Places, few days later, there was no error as “currently do not support this location”.

   Reply
4. Scott says:

   September 30, 2011 at 10:27 pm

   nice one, published an update and it seemed to fix this immediately.

   Reply