As Barry Schwartz and Mike Blumenthal posted, Google has introduced Local Business Center Guidelines. Here are the rules at a high level, verbatim:
- Represent your business exactly as it appears in real life
- List information that provides as direct a path to the business 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
- Use the description and custom attribute fields to include additional information about your listing
This helps provide necessary guidance to local businesses and their agencies, as well as clearly define spam by implication. There’s more in both of the posts above and on the guidelines themselves.
Screenwerk 
September 16, 2008 at 6:01 pm
It will be interesting to see what effect this will have on all of the map spam, and how long it will take them to remove all that is already out there. This is definitely a step in the right direction…
September 16, 2008 at 6:15 pm
I think it will help because it helps define spam and what’s permissible.
September 16, 2008 at 10:19 pm
while it helps define spam it opens up new problems considering their vague title policy. check out the discussion/comments on mike blog for that.
September 16, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Thanks. I’m sure they’ll deal with that too as people bring it up and clarify
September 17, 2008 at 2:47 pm
We have just seen the tip of the iceberg of map spam. I’d guess Google has seen an increase recently hence the updated version.
September 19, 2008 at 4:14 am
If I’m an electrician who works in Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, Castro Valley & Hayward and I deserving of a black ball from google if I’d like to be on the map for all of those cities?
Or should I just quit my business and declare bankruptcy because google has decided that I should be limited to a territory that is too small to be profitable.
September 19, 2008 at 11:14 am
Google will let you target those areas with ads of course. But this is an interesting issue re “service areas.”
July 27, 2010 at 2:29 pm
They have added another new feature called Tags. These allow you to add a special offer next to your listing. They are yellow and really help to make your name stand out. Seems that right now not many people use them -so it might be a good time to add them to your local listing.