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Understanding Google My Business & Local Search

Google Maps announces Quality Guidelines & Reinclusion Option

Today Google Maps has introduced quality guidelines for business listings in the Google Maps. Google has also now provided a reinclusion option. Both are available via the Google Maps Help Center.

Quality Guidelines:

The following items outline practices that could result in your business listings being permanently removed from Google Maps. While they cover the most common practices to avoid, Google may respond negatively to other practices not listed here. If you have any question about whether or not a tactic is deceptive, we recommend you stand on the side of caution.

  • Represent your business exactly as it appears in real life. The name on Google Maps should match the business name, as should the address, phone number and website.
  • List information that provides as direct a path to the business as you can. Given the choice, you may want to list individual location phone numbers over a central phone line, official website pages rather than a directory page, and as exact of an address as you can.
  • Only include listings for businesses that you represent.
  • Don’t participate in any behavior with the intention or result of listing your business more times than it exists. Service area businesses, for example, should not create a listing for every town they service. Likewise, law firms or doctors should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties.
  • Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing. This type of content should never appear in your business’s title or address fields.

The guidelines are a first real indication of Google’s standards for defining a real business listing from a spammy one. Previously the only known criteria was the single location/single listing rule. However the guideline still offer some ambiguity as to what is spam and what isn’t. For example are affiliate florist’s phone numbers that are listed in local phone books like Superpages using local exchanges but having no actual address considered spam?

For the first time Google has made an authoritative statement about keyword stuffing of business title. This type of content should never appear in your business’s title or address fields. The word never indicates that it is a clear and unambiguous reason for being delisted but as I have found in the small business world there already is ambiguity as to naming of businesses. This reality creates a fairly broad area of both discretion for Google and unclearness for small businesses.

The reinclusion request takes on a certain confessional aspect with required self reflection and identification of the SEO firm that may have precipitated the problem.

Kudos to Google for clarifying their rules and creating an opportunity for reinclusion when appropriate. These rules provide much clearer guidance about what can and can not be done.