{"id":5541,"date":"2024-06-27T21:23:59","date_gmt":"2024-06-27T21:23:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wpmudev.whitespark.ca\/?page_id=5541"},"modified":"2024-06-27T21:25:19","modified_gmt":"2024-06-27T21:25:19","slug":"acceptable-google-maps-nap-abbreviations-and-variations","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/whitespark.ca\/acceptable-google-maps-nap-abbreviations-and-variations\/","title":{"rendered":"Acceptable Google Maps NAP abbreviations & variations"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nAcceptable Google Maps NAP abbreviations & variations\n<\/h1>

\nBy Nyagoslav Zhekov\n<\/h1>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/section>
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\nAbout this resource\n<\/h3>
\nOur Listings Service<\/a> clients frequently ask questions regarding address formatting. The enquiry often goes something like this:

Does it matter if the street name of our business is \u201c123 James Ave\u201d instead of \u201c123 James Avenue\u201d?

As you can probably imagine, this question comes in different nuances and versions but the answer (almost) always boils down to the same thing \u2013 Google and Bing are smart enough to understand abbreviations (or slight variations) and to associate them with their non-abbreviated counterparts.

If this was not the case, Google would only be able to associate a minuscule part of any business\u2019s online citations to their actual existing Google+ Local listing. Even worse, there might be tons of duplicate listings for every single business, a result of even the smallest of inconsistencies in formatting (see my comment on MerchantCircle here for comparison). Differences such as in \u201cJSC\u201d vs \u201cJ.S.C.\u201d do not affect in any way Google\u2019s ability to recognize these as the same thing for the purposes of business data clustering.\n<\/div>\n<\/div>
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\nPut a little trust in the algorithm\n<\/h3>
\nMike Blumenthal discussed this topic back in 2012 by answering the question, Does Google Normalize NAP Data? (Name, Address, Phone).

If Google were not able to normalize this [business] data correctly, then virtually every listing in Google would show duplicates. They don\u2019t. In fact, as a percentage of the total number of businesses in Google\u2019s local index (somewhere north of 100 million), very few on a percentage basis have duplicate listings. So, for the most part, the algo handles those minor discrepancies well.

- Mike Blumenthal<\/a><\/i>

While many people understand that Google algorithms are capable of normalizing data, many people still want to know which address abbreviations and formatting are acceptable. In light of this, we have compiled a list.\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>
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\nWhich business details does Google normalize?\n<\/h2>
\nBasically, any of the variations below are a-ok and won\u2019t mess with your NAP consistency:
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\nBusiness name\n<\/h4>
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