Google Cleaning Up Places For Business Like Never Before

You may have noticed some alarming drop-offs in your Google Plus or Google Places for Business traffic. We have confirmed with 3 other agencies and multiple vendors that they are experiencing the same strange tracking issues making their Google Plus traffic graph look like this:

And Google Places for Business traffic look like this:

Funny enough, in many of these cases, we have seen an increase in search positions for these same listings now appearing to have no traffic. We will keep a close eye out for anything official from Google that we can go ahead and share with you regarding these now nearly week long tracking issues.

The following messages from Google help to confirm that there is some kind of mass cleanup going on. Google is merging listings that appear to belong together and it would appear they are giving ownership to the most authoritative listing while revoking access to duplicates.

Google did warn over two months ago about this cleanup, more or less saying do it yourself in the next 3 weeks, or we will do it for you as we see fit. See this article at SearchEngineWatch.com for details.

We will update this post if more information becomes available. Please feel free to share your experiences or concerns in the comments thread.

Update 4/24/2014: All tracking issues appear to be resolved and the data from the missing days was recovered as well! Check your Google Places for Business and Google Plus accounts.