Reuben Yau (of reubenyau.com) points out an interesting annomoly that occurs from time to time with categories in Google Maps where a business can achieve onebox or authoritative onebox listing in a category that doesn’t exist in the Google Local Business Center. He wrote: The other thing I noticed is that the category for that site is Gazebo Builder which is taken from Acxiom’s database, but that category is not present within GLBC. FYI Acxiom is the database behind yellowpages etc.
Here is what Google has to say in the Google Maps for Business Owners Forum: Because our listings come from different sources, not all categories
available on Maps are in the Local Business Center – you may want to use to
category suggestion page to submit Services – Resume. That’ll help us
improve our category options in the future.
One wonders why Google would want to limit the categories and what process they use to decide whether to accept a category. It would be interesting to have a list of those categories that Google uses but that they don’t make available through the Google Local Business Center.
[...] Of all the problems with Google Maps, the category issues (which can lead to strange outcomes) should be the easiest to fix. [...]
Pingback by Understanding Google Maps & Yahoo Local » Local Data Accuracy- a veritable beehive — January 18, 2007 @ 12:26 pm
[...] Again from Google Local Business Center or one of its partners (which means that sometimes the categories don’t come from Local Business Center ). How Google cross references these is of interest. [...]
Pingback by Understanding Google Maps & Yahoo Local Search » 10 Likely Elements of Google’s Local Search Algorithm — February 16, 2007 @ 10:43 am