I’ve come across quite a few panicked business owners in the Google My Business forums regarding this message that is slowly being sent out to Google+ page owners:
Hello,
It looks like the Google+ page for [business name] has not been used in a while. To simplify your Google My Business listing, we will be removing this additional page from our system in 30 days.
This change won’t affect your Google My Business listing – you can still be found on Google Search and Maps. You can download a copy of your old content before it’s deleted by visiting this page. Alternatively, you can post or comment on someone else’s post within 30 days to keep your Google+ page active.
Thank you,
Your Google My Business team
Please note, this email address is not monitored.
First of all, this email from Google is completely legitimate. Several notifications have been sent in follow up to the original email now, giving detail of the exact pages which have been inactive.
Although a lot of the worry I’m seeing is completely unnecessary. Let’s get a few things straight:
- a Google+ page and your Google My Business (GMB) listing are two separate entities. If your Google+ page is deleted, this does not affect your GMB listing
- all reviews you’ve accumulated on your business through Google relate to your GMB listing, not your Google+ page. So if your Google+ page is deleted, your reviews that you’ve worked hard to get will still be available on GMB
- Google has sent out this notice to users of Google+ pages that don’t get used regularly (the page may have been created automatically once upon a time), so they want to clear up any profiles that have no purpose
- Google+ is a social network that gets used very infrequently, and I suspect this is a step in the direction of Google phasing out the platform
- again – don’t freak out: you can easily hang on to your Google+ page if you still use it. All you need to do is post or comment on someone else’s post within 30 days
Final Thoughts
I’m not surprised that Google has decided to move in this direction. A lot of the functionality that was exclusively available through Google+ is now available through GMB.
The ‘social network’ component can now been seen in GMB through the introduction of Google Posts, and perhaps Google Q&A’s (which still have a long way to go). Here’s my recommendation for how this could be improved.
Another component that is currently rolling out to all GMB listings is the ability to add a description, which was available a couple of years ago before Google dropped it’s Google+ support, now they’ve added it again via GMB…
All in all – I’m happy to see Google move in this direction to remove a lot of the clutter 🙂