Hot off the press from Mike Blumenthal, Google Maps Annouces Quality Guidelines and Reinclusion Option
Read the full text here. An excerpt:
Read the full text here. An excerpt:
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.
FYI - Reinclusion requests are for companies thrown out for violating the guidelines.
Time will tell if Google actually enforces these rules. I'm curious to see if/when some wise-acre starts spamming competitor data in hopes of getting others kicked out.
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.
FYI - Reinclusion requests are for companies thrown out for violating the guidelines.
Time will tell if Google actually enforces these rules. I'm curious to see if/when some wise-acre starts spamming competitor data in hopes of getting others kicked out.
