Imagine that you have your business setup in Google on 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 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 as you may end up having to verify the business again if you do that.
I hope this helps some local businesses who are fighting with the same bug on Google Places.