Google has updated its Google Business Profiles links policies and guidelines, introducing new sections on dedicated landing pages, direct action completion, social media sites, and a business links crawlability policy. Businesses using links on their profiles must comply with these updated guidelines and prohibited content policies.
Business Links and Eligibility
Business links enable customers to perform actions like booking appointments or placing orders online. However, not all businesses qualify for all types of links; for example, hair salons can offer appointment bookings but not online ordering. Eligibility may also vary by country or region.
Guidelines for Adding and Managing Links
- Invalid Links: Links must not contain spaces, symbols, backslashes, or invalid protocols. Errors must be corrected before submission.
- Verification: Businesses must verify their profile before adding links. Approved links appear on Google Search and Maps.
- Dedicated Landing Pages: Links must lead to a dedicated page for the specific business location, not a general or unrelated page.
- Direct Action Completion: Links must allow customers to complete the intended action (e.g., placing an order). Links to social media, messaging, app stores, or link shorteners are not allowed.
- Link Verification: Google regularly checks links for compliance using automated and manual methods. Non-compliant or inaccessible links may be removed.
- Maximum Links: Up to 20 links per transaction type (e.g., booking, food ordering) are allowed. Adding more requires removing existing links.
- Duplicate and Domain Restrictions: Duplicate links, multiple links from the same domain, or conflicting third-party domain links are not permitted to simplify user experience.
Business Links Crawlability Policy
Google verifies business links by crawling them up to daily to ensure they lead to valid, relevant webpages. Links inaccessible to Google's automated crawlers may be removed.
Key Definitions:
- Link Crawlability: The ability of Google’s crawlers to access content, including redirects and resources like images and scripts.
- Automated Bot Protection: Mechanisms that block or limit crawler access, such as robots.txt restrictions, rate limiting, CAPTCHAs, IP blocking, user-agent restrictions, or content cloaking.
- HTTP Status Codes: Server responses indicating page status (e.g., 200 OK for success, 404 Not Found for missing pages).
Crawlability Requirements:
- Google’s crawlers do not obey robots.txt rules for verification.
- Links must allow unrestricted access to crawlers identified by the User-Agent "GoogleOther."
- Websites must not implement rate limiting, CAPTCHAs, login requirements, IP blocking, or content cloaking that blocks crawlers.
- Links must resolve to functioning webpages returning a successful HTTP status code (e.g., 200 OK) and not error codes like 404, 403, 500, or 503.
- Pages must fully load all resources (images, CSS, JavaScript).
- No geoblocking or DNS-based blocking is allowed.
These policies ensure that business links on Google Business Profiles are accurate, trustworthy, and accessible to users and Google's verification systems.
