With Google’s new effort to get business owners to manage their business listing in web search and not in the Google Business Profile manager, formerly Google My Business, Google is now using large overlays to tell businesses they can do so in search.

Andy Simpson shared a few screenshots of this and said on Twitter that this overlay comes up when you search for your business in Google Search. This isn’t live for everyone but I am not sure on the criteria for when this might show up or not.

Here is the screenshot:

Here are more screenshots:

…additional screenshots #localseo pic.twitter.com/d6BwqPXVsX

— Andy Simpson 🇬🇧 (@ndyjsimpson) January 14, 2022

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Google’s John Mueller confirmed that the search company’s 2014 guidance with faceted navigation remains true today – do not use non-standard URL encoding. That means do not use commas, brackets or other non-standard URL encoding in your URL structure.

Instead, use ampersands, equal signs, hyphens or other supported and standard URL encoded URLs for your fascinated navigation. This guidance is listed in Google’s blog post from 2014, here is a screenshot:

John said on Twitter it is “still a bad idea” to use non-standard URL encoding for this purpose:

Yep, still a bad idea.

— 🐄 John 🐄 (@JohnMu) January 11, 2022

I still see many sites using these methods – I wonder why…

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Google Maps, the map interface, is testing displaying review snippets, short selected reviews, directly under the name of the business or organization in the map interface under the pin. This was spotted by Allie Margeson who said on Twitter “seeing review snippets get some prominence directly on the map and I like it!”

Here is her screenshot:

Personally, I am not a fan of this, it seems to really clutter up the map interface a lot to me…

Allie added “Another reason to get keywords in your reviews.”

⭐️Seeing review snippets get some prominence directly on the map and I like it! Another reason to get keywords in your reviews – find out how: https://t.co/khK5WW4cmS. pic.twitter.com/u1VIwLkRKK

— Allie Margeson (@SeoAllie) January 17, 2022

Do you like it? Even if you don’t and Google launches this, you better have some really nice short review snippets that Google can select.

Forum discussion at Twitter.