According to an email sent out to official "Google Photographer for Business Views" photographers, Google has announced that they will shut down un-verified Google + pages, as well as those not associated with a user account, on July 28th, 2015.
Outside of these emails, Google hasn't publicly commented on this move, but the local SEO community has had a lot of activity around it. Some of the ideas around it are:
1- Google is just cleaning up old, unused pages that are cluttering up Google + and not serving searchers positively.
2- This signals the end of a relationship between Google Plus and Local Search.
3- This will make it easier for businesses to keep track of their local listings.
4- This will make it harder for businesses to find NAP issues with duplicate Google + pages.
Back in early June, Jade Wang, who is with the Google My Business Maps team announced in the Google Business Help forums that Google would start to unverify accounts that were inactive, after having contacted the account owner via email. Is this related to the deletion of unverified pages? Could be- Google has unverified pages that aren't being supported by the owner, which then makes them eligible to be deleted.
The upshot for local business is that if you haven't claimed and verified your business Google + page by tomorrow, it will disappear. You should be logging into your Google + business page and updating it a few times a week. If you are following this practice, you shouldn't have anything to worry about. If your page is deleted, the good news is that all you have to do is set up a new page and verify it.
Annie Buck
Local, Social Media and Education Support, Acorn IS
