Place Pages Finally Put a Stop to 'Business Closing' Sabotage

Finally, after some press and a lot of complaining, Google has changed the way it allows users to report problems with a business on Google Places. The issue stems from competitors and other pesky users reporting that a business was permanently closed when they are very much still open for business. Since Google essentially had no fail-safe here, you can see how this could get out of hand and ruin smaller companies.

Here's Google's statement:

"As promised, we've recently made a change to our process of displaying when a business has been reported to be closed on its place page. More specifically, we have removed the interim notification about a report having been made so that a listing will only be updated after it has been reviewed by Google and we believe the change to be accurate.

As mentioned above, Google will actually do research into the matter and there will no longer be the interim message of Reported to Be Closed.

Hopefully this helps solve an obvious shortcoming.