Backlinking to Google Place Page - Worth it?

Do you bother building back links to a places page?
Lots of you guys do Places Page optimization.
Apart for keyword research and SEO of the places page itself what else do you do?

Personally I try to make it easy for existing customers to find my client's places page to leave positive reviews.
But I wondered if I should be treating it like a web 2.0 property. Getting it links from relevant sites and such.

What say you?

There is a lot of information about this subject throughout the forum. I wouldn't recommend it, google places is all about on page SEO, reviews, and more importantly citations.

The more citations google has from other business directories of the correct name / address / etc. will help tremendously. (think of this as the backlinking)

It may help get your citations indexed quicker if you backlinks to the actual citations with a scrapebox blast but thats it really.

I've heard the term citations tossed around a few times.
Does this just mean reviews like at yelp and other review sites?

I thought that google was done scraping reviews from yelp and such. Or is this different.

Sorry for the total noob questions. Local search optimization has it's own learning curve.

citations is the business name,address,phone #, sometimes website address

Citations need to be consistant everywhere it is posted else Google will over look it.

bhspiderz said:

citations is the business name,address,phone #, sometimes website address

Citations need to be consistant everywhere it is posted else Google will over look it.

Click to expand...

You mean like a directory listing? Or actual reviews or what?
Can you give me an example of what is or is not a "citation". It's just the term is unfamiliar to me.

if you go into a google place listing .... Let's say a popular one like Dentist. at the top lefthand side you see their business name, address, phone #,website

Now if you go to "yellow pages" dot com and type in some business and area you can see all the businesses listed and they are all in citation format. Google sees these and matches them to a google places listing. Citations are all over the place but google has removed the ability to see where they are within the google places area. So you either need to manually look around or get a tool to dig them up for you.

I don't think there's any benefit. I'd spend time on building more citations instead.