Joy Hawkins of Imprezzio Marketing, alerted me to this post in the Google forum where a business noted that the Google Places for Business Guidelines do not prohibit the use of city in the category field . Apparently Google has recently changed the Google Places Quality Guidelines and removed the prohibition against the use of geography in the category field.

Should you now add your city to a custom category?  The short answer: No. Google knows where you business is located.

Here is the long answer.

The Google Places Guidelines have apparently been rewritten to apply to the new Google Places for Business Dashboard. In that environment there is no option to create a custom category nor any ability to add a geographic modifier to a category. Businesses can only choose from a predefined list of categories so the rule becomes irrelevant. The option to add custom categories is only possible in the old Google Places for Business Dashboard which will soon be going away.

Those of you in the old Dashboard still have the capability to add custom categories but I would strongly urge you not to add city to your category field, even if competitors are doing so. The reason that Google originally banned the practice was that it gave companies an unfair edge in the search rankings and was widely abused. In response Google at first wrote a guideline to prohibit it. However some months thereafter they implemented an algorithm that punished those listings using geographic category modifiers by dramatically reducing their rank and preventing them from showing in their primary category searches.

That algorithm change is still in effect even though the rule isn’t. As happened to the poster above, a business that was using this sort of modified category called me, desperately wondering why their listing was no longer visible. Within 48 hours of removing the geo modifiers from their business name AND categories, the business bounced back onto the front page listings.