Interacting with a verified location? - Google Maps

Question

Ok so there are loads of Businesses marked on Google Maps these days.

But I cannot interact with these in any way.

This is the information I have:

venue name: Ministry of Sound

address: 103 Gaunt Street London, SE1 6DP

Google's Geolocation only gives me

• Coordinates (lat, long)
• Formatted Address

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I want an application to access this page -> Ministry of Sound - Google Page

I would like to:

• Add reviews (eg. sites like Qype, ViewLondon, Frommers do it!)
• Add photos and videos
• Add Other Content

Also I would like to:

• Link an address to the Business automatically if possible

eg. if the business shares the same address

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Edit:

SilentGhost said "Google just indexes and aggregates information from the sites"

If the only way to get reviews and information on the site is to get it indexed...

how do I tell Google that what my site contains are:

• Photo of the Venues
• Reviews of the Venue
• Information about the Venue?

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Help would be very much appreciated. thanks! :)

Answer 1

I think there is a certain confusion here. The main reason that you cannot interact with this information and for the lack of API is because none of these things (reviews, photos, videos, other content) is actually owned by Google. Google just indexes and aggregates information from the sites like Qype, ViewLondon, etc. It is a catalogue of sorts to get an overview and explore certain aspects further.

Answer 2

The Google product of local business entries you are referring to is called "Local Business Cent[er|re]". As far as I know, there is no API to access and manipulate these entries *. You can, however, add coupons, photos, videos, etc. via web interface, even in bulk. Note that you can not add reviews to your own listings.

If you only want to access the Place Page, there are various ways (address, coordinates) to do so.

* The closest it gets is the AdWords Location Extensions, which lets AdWords pull addresses directly from your Local Business Center (LBC) account (and put their map data into your ads).

Answer 3

You probably would have to get in touch with Google to let them know about your site and get them to include your reviews in their maps. Have a look at this and this page which is specifically aimed at businesses who want to distribute their content through the Google apps.

Answer 4

In response to your edited question:

You should look at microformats like hReview, Google indexes and uses these in search results if not on the page you linked to. See: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html and http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=21997