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Understanding Google My Business & Local Search

Google Places Quality Guideline Update

Google has recently added a new section to the Google Places quality guidelines concerning Custom Attributes & Description fields. From the updated guidelines (bold is mine):

Custom Attributes & Description

  • 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, address or category fields.
  • Please see this page of Google Places User Guide for examples of acceptable custom attributes.

Google typically prefers to provide less rather than more guidance in the quality guidelines unless there is significant abuse, a significant decline in end user experience and/or a ranking penalty. This update is consistent with the geo-spamming penalties we have seen in the past. Obviously if you are in Columbus Oh, Google already knows that and including the phrase in the description and custom fields has no purpose other than to “fool” Google. It is unclear to me though, what situations this new rule applies to besides the excessive use of geographic terms.

I see some difficulties with the guideline as well. If a business title includes the word physician, the category is also physician, might it not make sense to perhaps include the word physician in the description (i.e. Dr. Alvarez is a caring physician) and perhaps in the custom attributes as well to describe additional medical practices performed that didn’t fit in the 5 categories?

You thoughts on this change and its import?