Most of us carpet cleaners operate out of our homes and don’t have a separate business address. Just recently Google has announced that they no longer will allow residential addresses to be displayed on business listing. This doesn’t really make sense because a huge percentage of businesses in this country are home based. It doesn’t necessarily mean that rankings will be effected. We will have to let the dust settle and see how everything shakes out.
PLEASE NOTE, this only applies if you are using a home address (residential address, not an office) as your listed address in Google places/+:
Maybe you have already seen this email:
Dear Google Places user,
We’d like to tell you about a recent update to our quality guidelines. This new addition, which affects service area businesses based at a residential location, states:
If you don’t conduct face-to-face business at your location, you must select the “Do not show my business address on my Maps listing” option within your dashboard. If you don’t hide your address, your listing may be removed from Google Maps.
Why the addition? We want to ensure that Google users do not attempt to visit your business at the location listed publicly on Maps — it’s a bad experience for you, it’s a bad experience for them.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll begin strictly enforcing this guideline, more so than we have been since the policy change. This means that if you don’t have a storefront, and you haven’t hidden your address, your listing is not in compliance with our updated quality guidelines and subject to takedown. We wanted to give you a heads up both to give you enough time to be in compliance and to ensure your listing remains live on Google Maps going forward.
Please update your Google Places listing to ensure it remains active on Google.
Sincerely,
The Google Team
If you manage your own Google Places listing, and your address is a residential home, please follow the following instructions:
To hide your address:
• Go to your Google Places dashboard
• Click “Edit” on the listing to view its details
• Select “Yes, this business serves customers at their locations”
• Select “Do not show my business address on my Maps listing”
• Hit Submit
