I strongly agree that open categories make lots of sense and that there is a certain ambiguity in the search “clean hotel”. Clearly the world is a varied place and being able to categorize correctly and appropriately is a good thing.

That being said even Google, their new guidelines, felt that the type of behavior noted above was a violation of appropriate listing practices and banned the infinite number of categories in one field.

They noted: When entering categories, use only those that directly describe your business. Do not submit related categories that do not define your business. For example, a taxi company might properly categorize itself as “Airport Transportation”, but it would be inaccurate to also use the category “Airport”. Also, please use each category field to enter a single category. Do not list multiple categories or keywords in one field.

Clearly this violates those guidelines. Also it would not be that difficult for them to error check the fields to be sure that it isn’t happening or to scan through the index to flag and review those that look a tad suspicious.

While it is important to have flexibility, without guidelines and some structure things rapidly head downhill.

In accommodation you could say there are preset catagories as these are the ones used in suggestions to refine a poorly organized search. The open catagories we create are good for fringe groupings that just don’t fit elsewhere.

Also, this is a worldwide tool. People in other countries don’t use terms like Lodging, which was something that Google seemed to push at an earlier stage. Vacation Rentals in America could be Holiday Letting in Australia.

Why Thank you

It’s kind of a weird example, because you can almost follow the thinking of a carpet cleaner offering to ‘clean hotel’. Obviously, this is spam, but it has a weird kind of logic to it.

You sure to turn up the most amazing spam, Mike.

Google needs to either go back to using only preset categories. Or have 4 preset categories and one category that you can customize. Either way the custom categories field needs to have a 50 character limit or something.

I know there will always going to be a small number of of businesses that will have a hard time finding a preset category related to them… but Google shouldn’t make it this easy for spammers.