https://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=75569

If you try to verify your business listing by phone and it doesn't work, this could be for one of several reasons:

• You have an automated phone system or phone tree.

If you encountered any of the reasons above, please request the PIN to be sent to you by mail.

Whats odd is that you don't have postcard verification option. I recommend you post this problem on their local business forums at http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/business

Good luck!

Yup, they are counted. Yelp won't show up because it uses a redirect but I see merchantcircle, urbanspoon, manta, etc in my GWT links list. OSE is reporting less but i still have a urbanspoon and yellowpages backlink.

You should be fine SEO/crawler wise. The most common & recommended structure for wordpress blogs is to just display the post title without the category in the url (i.e. site.com/post-title/) while the category pages are site.com/c/cat-title.

More than anything, you might have trouble your own site/script to differentiate categories from products if you use the same url structure (what page would you mod_rewrite to? would you have to process all category AND product slugs?) - that's the reason for the /42003836/ part of the link you mentioned. Unless you have limited categories, it might get complicated.

I wouldn't say there is a limit but you if you are writing about a limited topic, the more you write, the less focused your content may become. Although it will improve long tail, could hurt the target phrase you are trying to rank for.

In addition, if you just start repeating yourself over and over again, it wont do you any favors. You are better off writing more succinctly with high quality so that people looking to solve a specific problem can visit that page and find a solution (and hopefully link back to it!). If its too long, it might be harder for a person to find what they are looking for.