Get started: Quality guidelines

Business listings in Google Places must have correct information about physical, local businesses, as they appear in the real world. Google reserves the right to suspend access to Google Places or to other Google Services to individuals or businesses violating these guidelines.
Ownership

• Only business owners or authorized representatives may verify their business listings on Google.

Business Name

• Represent your business exactly as it appears in the offline world. The name on Google should match the business name, as should the address, phone number and website.
• Do not attempt to manipulate search results by adding extraneous keywords or a description of your business into the business name.
• Do not include phone numbers or URLs in the business name.

Physical Location

• Do not create listings at locations where the business does not physically exist.
• PO Boxes do not count as physical locations.
• Do not create more than one listing for each business location, either in a single account or multiple accounts.
• Businesses that operate in a service area as opposed to a single location should not create a listing for every city they service. Service area businesses should create one listing for the central office of the business only.
• Businesses with special services, such as law firms and doctors, should not create multiple listings to cover all of their specialties.
• The precise address for the business must be provided in place of broad city names or cross-streets.
• A property for rent is not considered a place of business. Please create one listing for the central office that processes the rentals. If you'd like, you can add your real estate properties to Google Maps so that they are available on our Real Estate layer.

URL & Phone

• Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible. For example, you should provide an individual location phone number in place of a call center.
• Provide one URL that best identifies your individual business location.
• Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or 'refer' users to other landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business.

Custom Attributes & Description

• 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.
• Please see this page of Google Places User Guide for examples of acceptablecustom attributes.

Best Practices

• Use standard capitalization & punctuation, unless your business name or address in the real world contains unusual capitalization & punctuation.
• Use a shared, business email account, if multiple users will be updating your business listing.
• If possible, use an email account with a domain that matches your business URL. For example, if your business website is www.giraffetoys.com, a matching email address would be you@giraffetoys.com.

For more information about Google Places, please visit the Google Places user guide.