![\"Screen](\"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Screen-Shot-2013-04-02-at-4.04.05-PM-520x388.png\")
One of the big changes in the rollout of the new Places for Business Dashboard is a change with categories. Categories have long been a key factor in Google’s determination of relevance of a listing. Google has added some additional categories, changed how categories are handled as well how many categories a business is allowed to have.<\/p>\n
The bad news? The big change, \u00a0predicted for some time, is the elimination of the option of custom categories. Google has moved to a fixed list of choices.<\/p>\n
The synonym feature is also missing. Thus a user that doesn’t know exactly what they want in terms of categories will find it very hard to locate the correct categories.<\/p>\n
The good news? Up to ten categories are allowed. Google has noted at the most recent LocalU seminar that categorical information about a business is retrieved from across the internet. Exactly what web based resources are likely to impact this are not totally clear.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/more-than-5-categories-520x433.png\")
<\/p>\n
The category list is a dramatic improvement over what is\/was available to businesses that verified via the G+ Page local interface and the list is very similar to those categories previously available<\/a> to users of the current Dashboard.<\/p>\n There appear to be some additional categories in the new list, particularly in the area of restaurants. Upon an initial and superficial check I could not find additional categories in other areas besides restaurants although there may be a few.\u00a0In the previous category list there were 76 types of restaurants<\/a>. In the new category list there are 230 restaurant types<\/a>. For example Google added the following restaurant types (amongst others):<\/p>\n Tongue Restaurant I am curious whether a “Tongue Restaurant” is what it sounds like? Why exactly do we need the category “Southwest France Restaurant”?<\/p>\n The new list contains a total 2295 category choices. I am including the complete Places for Business category list <\/a>(US only) here in HTML format and hope to have the list integrated with my Google Places category tool<\/a> in the near future.<\/p>\n Related posts:<\/p>\n Google rolling out new update to Google Places for Business<\/a><\/p>\n Visual Guide to the new Places for Business Dashboard\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n
\nUzbeki Restaurant
\nSouthwest France Restaurant<\/p>\n