Google Maps Updated Quality Guidelines

Today Google rolled out some major changes in the quality guidelines of Google maps. Clearly business titles are the biggest area where people tend to stuff their keyword and try to outrank other competitors in onebox as well as in local search. Also creating muplitiple listing is a growing concern in Local Search Industry. I have mentioned about Local SEO Spam about few weeks earlier here in ThatsSEO. Today Google came out with a intereting list of revised quality guidelines.

Quality Guidelines:

• Only enter listings for businesses that you own or are explicitly authorized to represent.

• Represent your business exactly as it appears in the offline world. The name on Google Maps should match the business name, as should the address, phone number and website.

• Do not attempt to manipulate search results by adding extraneous keywords into the title field, and do not include phone numbers or URLs in the title along with your proper business name.

• Create only one listing for each physical location of your business. Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts. 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.

• When entering categories, use only those that directly describe your business. Do not submit related categories that do not define your business. For example, a taxi company might properly categorize itself as “Airport Transportation”, but it would be inaccurate to also use the category “Airport”. Also, please use each category field to enter a single category. Do not list multiple categories or keywords in one field.

• Provide information that best identifies your individual locations and provides users with the most direct path to your business. For example, you should provide individual location phone numbers in place of central phone lines and the precise address for the business in place of broad city names or cross-streets.

• Provide the one URL that belongs to your business both in terms of the landing page and the displayed URL. Pages that redirect to another domain, or act as “click through” sites may lead to penalization.

• 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.

How far these guidelines will affect the present scenario! This raises few questions.

• What happen to the listing which does not follow the above guidelines?(Keywords in title)

• Will this create any red flag for such listing / completely removed from the LBC?

• If a competitor makes a edit with custom edit option to include the above said points, what would be the end?

Google also included an option to Report Spam in Google Maps and reinclusuion request option. To my surprise Google asks for an important information in the reinclusion request form which says “If you used a search engine optimization (SEO) company, please also note any information regarding your transactions.”. What would Google do by knowing the transaction details with the SEO Company? If it feels that its over paid by you, will it repay you??? LOL! Let us wait and see the game how Google tackles Google Map Spam with the new quality guidelines.