G+ Places in SERP

Hello,

Cities in this question are in same country.

I found some "anomaly" in search results. If I search "dentist [cityA]" in my country it returns google places results (the 7 pack). However If I search for the same keyword with different city (even larger one), there is no 7 pack. My donkey brain tells me noone is using google places in larger city but some smartass back in the head tells me there must other reason. For example, the second city's SERP shows a lot more ads for the keyword match - top, bottom, sidebars. Ads everywhere.

Does google suppress google places 7pack if there are a lot of ads for that kw ???

Geolocation

Google uses your ISP to determine you location, then provides a 7 pack of geolocated results according to it.
Outside of that, you don't need geolocated results, so you see the regular serps, which seems like alot of paid ads.

Indeed, that's quite interesting. For other large cities I see the 7pack, but for this one, I must click on Map and click More to see others - the ones that didn't show in the results. This country is so specific, cause there is often low chance the google will guess my location by ISP - most of country points to capital city.

Right now I sit 200km from capital city, I am in the middle of its "length" so another 300km to the end of it and of course, geolocation of my ip says I'm in capital city which is so not true

Yea, sometimes their disambiguation algos don't factor so well. They think that since your cities are mentioned in the competitors BLs, that you must be in the area.

Something to learn here would be to build backlinks to all surrounding cities so that you can establish rankings everywhere.

Alright, I think I found the issue there. The same dentists who are in Google Places are also in Ads category so Google shows them in Ads banner and doesn't show them in 7-google-places-space then. Clever.

With the new Google + Dashboard rolling out they have been showing some keywords in some cities and some not they also haven't decided if they are going to show local 7 pack on some they show more and some they show less and it all depends on time and day if it will show up until they decide what is worth while to show local results to and what.