{"id":16215,"date":"2014-02-20T15:16:37","date_gmt":"2014-02-20T19:16:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/?p=16215"},"modified":"2014-02-20T17:00:40","modified_gmt":"2014-02-20T21:00:40","slug":"google-places-guideline-update-now-allowing-descriptors-in-business-title","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2014\/02\/20\/google-places-guideline-update-now-allowing-descriptors-in-business-title\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Places Guideline Update: Now Allowing Descriptors in Business Title"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Google has <a href=\"https:\/\/productforums.google.com\/forum\/#!category-topic\/business\/SthxqtBIozw\">announced<\/a> an\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/places\/answer\/107528?hl=en\">update<\/a>\u00a0to their <a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/places\/answer\/107528?hl=en\">Places Guidelines<\/a> and now is explicitly allowing owners to add a descriptor, via the Places or Plus Dashboard, that helps people locate the business or describes what the business offers. From the post (bold is mine to highlight the significant change):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li dir=\"ltr\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Your title should reflect your business\u2019s real-world title.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li dir=\"ltr\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><strong>In addition to your business\u2019s real-world title, you may include a single descriptor that helps customers locate your business or understand what your business offers.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li dir=\"ltr\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\">Marketing taglines, phone numbers, store codes, or URLs are not valid descriptors.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li dir=\"ltr\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\"><strong>Examples of acceptable titles with descriptors (in <em>italics<\/em> for demonstration purposes) are \u201cStarbucks <em>Downtown<\/em>\u201d or \u201cJoe\u2019s Pizza<em> <\/em><em>Delivery<\/em>\u201d. Examples that would not be accepted would be \u201c<em>#1 Seattle Plumbing<\/em>\u201d, \u201cJoe\u2019s Pizza <em>Best Delivery<\/em>&#8220;, or \u201cJoe\u2019s <em>Pizza Restaurant Dallas<\/em>\u201d.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Obviously for Google to make this change, they must think that they can control the inane and insane abuse that is likely to occur. Either businss name is <a href=\"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2014\/02\/12\/google-local-hummingbird-diarrhea-persists-6-months-on\/#comment-710822\">no longer so important<\/a> in defining search results or the descriptor (which can only be added via the dashboard) is ignored or Google is so confident that they know what the business name is that they can penalize abusers.<\/p>\n<p>Or none of the above and the <a href=\"http:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/2014\/02\/20\/google-maps-mapmaker-exploits-just-for-the-fun-of-it\/\">recent decline<\/a> in the quality of their local index will continue to new lows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google has announced an\u00a0update\u00a0to their Places Guidelines and now is explicitly allowing owners to add a descriptor, via the Places or Plus Dashboard, that helps people locate the business or describes what the business offers. From the post (bold is mine to highlight the significant change): Your title should reflect your business\u2019s real-world title. In &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":262,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-google-plus"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16215"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16215\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16237,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16215\/revisions\/16237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blumenthals.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}