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Google Business Profile Guidelines Silently Updated
Slowly but surely, people are beginning to accept that a Google Business Profile is not a right, but a privilege. Even after successfully getting your hands on a listing for your business, holding on to it may not be as easy as you think.
Having declared an all-out war on scammers and spammers, Google recently published some of its biggest achievements from last year. All of which were aimed at refining the whole Google Business Profile landscape, and making its recommendations and ratings more reliable.
Examples of which included the following:
- More than 7 million fraudulent business profiles shut down
- 12 million fake business profiles blocked from being created
- 8 million fraudulent business claims declined
- 1 million accounts permanently closed for violating policies
- 95 million reviews removed for breaching terms and conditions
- More than 190 million photos and images blocked or removed
“Every day we receive around 20 million contributions from people using Maps. Those contributions include everything from updated business hours and phone numbers to photos and reviews,” wrote Google at the time.
“As with any platform that accepts contributed content, we have to stay vigilant in our efforts to fight abuse and make sure this information is accurate.”
99% Spam-Free
Since then, Google has reaffirmed its commitment to further improve its now 99% spam-free Maps and business listings. The war against spam continues, but so too does the silent (if not slightly sneaky) introduction of new rules and regulations for business owners.
Take a look at Google’s official spam restriction guidelines for business owners today and it all looks the same as it did a while back:
Examples of such content that is not allowed include:
- Misspellings, gimmicky character use, gibberish, or automated or distracting content such as blurry or poor image or video quality, or unrecognisable content
- Images, videos, or links that negatively distract the reader's attention
- Links to malware, viruses, or other harmful software
- Links to sites irrelevant to the business
- Phishing scams
- Duplicate photos, posts, videos, and logos
However, look closer and you may note that the last line - Duplicate photos, posts, videos, and logos – was not there until about a week ago.
It may not be the biggest of big deals, but was nonetheless added to the published guidelines with no fanfare or announcement whatsoever. As to whether or not it will have much of an impact on SEOs and website owners, the answer is...probably not.
What Google seems to be aiming for with these kinds of restrictions is the removal of anything that is not directly helpful to potential customers. This, therefore, means that while duplicate photos, posts, videos, and logos on a Business Profile may be removed by Google, their presence will not result in the listing being shut down entirely.
As a reminder, Google states that “content published on this service should not mislead your customers. It should be upfront and honest about the information presented.”
Given how duplicate content does not provide any value to anyone, it stands to reason that it should be (and now probably will be) removed.