WebProNews

Google has posted some official guidelines for listing your business in Google Maps. As more and more people refer to the Internet rather than the phonebook for looking up local businesses, business owners will want to pay close attention to the rules, so they are easily found on Google Maps.

The new guidelines read as follows:

- 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.

Basically, don't spam it. "The guidelines are a first real indication of Google’s standards for defining a real business listing from a spammy one," says Mike Blumenthal. "Previously the only known criteria was the single location/single listing rule."

Google was nice enough to also offer a re-inclusion request option, so if your business is removed, and you feel it did not deserve to be, you can have a chance to get it listed again. Follow the guidelines though, and hopefully that won't be an issue in the future.