Last night, Google Maps made updates to their local pages quality guidelines to maintain high quality information on Google. These new guidelines are completely revamped, but the real question here is will Google enforce them? These new guidelines can offer more clarification on business listings especially for multi-practitioner listings and naming.
Some notable highlights include:
- Choosing fewer categories to describe your overall core business.
- Virtual offices are now excluded unless staffed.
- Practitioner’s pages that have multiple locations should have name only and not the name of the practice.
- Only solo practitioners can use format of practice: practitioner.
- If you have two or more brands with the same locations you must pick one name.
- If different departments have their own page they also must have unique categories.
- Descriptors are no longer allowed.
For more on the new local quality guidelines follow here.