Look how old this is!
I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 11 years 10 months 14 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.

I have a high school friend whom I’ve helped with his website intermittently over the years, and I claimed his Google Local page for him quite a few years ago.  Last summer, I created a Google+ page for him also, and I never thought much about it after that.

A few weeks ago, I edited his Google Local page, adding his new logo and updating his photos, and of course, a verification was needed again. They sent a post card to him, and a couple of weeks later, I punched in the numbers and everything was fine.

Yesterday I happened to look at his Google+ Local page, and saw a warning saying that the edits I had made (also a few weeks ago) wouldn’t be shown until I verified with a PIN, which was odd, because I’d never seen a Google+ page requiring verification before… Have you?

Clicking around, I noticed that next to the business name it said “in-progress”  so I clicked there, and a box popped up saying they had mailed the verification card.

At first I assumed it was another post card, and I was going to email him to watch for it, but then it dawned on me that I had just gone through the process a couple of weeks earlier.

I dug up the email that he sent me after he received his other post card verification code, which I had already used at Google Places, plugged that into the verification box, and to my surprise, it worked!

Now he has BOTH a Google Local page and a Google+ page, but his Places page looks like crap, where the new logo and images are still not showing up, while his Google + plus page looks pretty good.  The two pages have not been “merged”, and I’m still on the fence about whether to do that or not.

Last fall I merged my own web hosting business page after watching a video on how it was done, and although it completely disappeared from the search results for nearly a month, it did come back, and it all seems to be completely fine now.

On the other hand, most of the advice out there warns NOT to merge the two  but I wonder if that advice might be changing soon, since clearly Google has been able to establish the relationship between the two pages on their own.

I’m not sure what I’ll do yet, but it’s nice to have high school friends to experiment on… 😉

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