Taking control over Google Places and Google+ Pages?

[MBASydney]

Hi we have a client who has about 40 different stores around the country. Most of the stores have their own Google+ Pages or Google Places. We want to take control of all 40 stores from a centralized location. So we can control their Google+ Pages/Google Places to improve them, and keep them uniformed with each other.How/Can can we do this?

Does Google provide any way to do this?

Thanks,

Mark

[irvingw]

you can create one gmail account and then claim ownership for all accounts while logged in and request pins, all 40 accounts will be listed under that one gmail account.

[Nick_Ker]

If you are looking for a way to update common info on all of them at one time, I don't think that is available.  If you are hoping to simplify it so you only need to login to one account to manage them all, that can be done by transferring ownership to one Profile.

Pick one G+ Profile (not Page) to be the Owner of all of them.
In the settings for each Google+ Local Page, make that Profile a Manager if it is not already.
Then you will be able to make that Manager the Owner.  
If the Profile was not previously a Manager of the Page, you will need to wait about 2 weeks  after making the Profile a Manager before you can do this.

The Places dashboard is not transferable, as far as I know.

Google Local / Places has been very screwy lately. Changing Places to Local is often resulting in the listing disappearing into Limbo for weeks, months or indefinitely - especially if there are any issues that may seem fishy to Google's moderators. Like service area businesses with no walk-in storefront, for example.

One very confusing thing is that the old Google Places dashboard is still active, but it isn't really clear what info is used from there, and what is used from Google+ Local. The Places dashboard does have the ability to upload bulk locations, but I am unsure how that would work with existing listings. http://www.google.com/local/add/

Really, if the listings are showing up OK and there isn't something very wrong with some of them, it may be safest to just tolerate having to update them from multiple owner profiles for the time being. It seems as though central management for businesses with multiple locations, like your client, SHOULD be something coming to Google+ Local in the future.

If you do decide to try to consolidate them under one Owner, make sure that everything in each listing is 100% legitimate.
You have probably already seen this, but here are Google's Places guidelines. http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528