It’s very easy to find local businesses, cafes and places of interest thanks to Google Maps. Unfortunately, due to the current situation with COVID-19, there are a lot of businesses affected. Any of the businesses that have been required to close, or chosen to under the contact restrictions can mark themselves as temporarily closed.
The news came in a Google Blog post from Sundar Pichai as the situation began to escalate in the USA
With so many disruptions to daily life, people are looking for more information about school or business closures. Based on data from governments and other authoritative sources, Google Search and Maps will now display if a place, like a school or local business, is temporarily closed. In the coming days, we’ll make it possible for businesses to easily mark themselves as “temporarily closed” using Google My Business.
A quick search found the Google Support Page with specific instructions on how to mark your business as temporarily closed.
To make your profile appear as temporarily closed on Google Maps and Search:
- On your computer, sign in to Google My Business.
- In the menu on the left, click Info.
- To the right, point to the section “Close this business on Google.”
- To expand this section you might need to click the arrow, Click Mark as temporarily closed.
It’s a great step from Google to protect business owners from their establishment being falsely marked as closed. Hopefully, we’ll see a lot of these businesses marked as open again by the end of the year.
The businesses at my local shopping centre, Toombul, are most definitely not on top of their accuracy of entries on Google Maps. Wrong locations on the Google Maps map of the centre, businesses still on the map long after they’ve moved out, or have permanently closed. So there being no way for users to able to mark businesses as temporarily closed due to the virus pandemic, ends up becoming problematic. Google should utilize the high ranked Google Guides, allowing them to identify businesses that have temporarily closed. That way there’s some reasonable alternative method to indicate to Google who’s still… Read more »
Unfortunately only the business owner has the ‘Temporarily Closed’ option – users can only submit an edit to mark the business as permanently closed, or special hours for up to a week of ‘closed’.
Great for owners on top of their Google listing, not great for everyone else.