Wednesday, August 29, 2012

4:01 AM

Google business.txt file

One of the newly webmaster things drifting around the web yesterday is on the business.txt file. This new concept based on the robots.txt file but is there to give business owners on simple and easy way to give search engine and local search engines a way to find the business address.

Business.txt is a file that local business host to their site with their business information so all websites providers can update it whensoever’s something is altered.

It is settled generally at the root of the domain under a file, /buisnss.txt.

Paul Kinlan is the chrome developer advocate said on Google+ that this is a poor idea. He said:
Please don't do this. I get humans.txt, but this is content that should be on your site and discoverable and searchable. The same problems this is trying to solve will also be present in this solution.
Yelp and all similar services need to get smarter and do the page scanning and indexing automatically.. THIS WILL NOT SOLVE THAT PROBLEM.
There are solutions like Schema.org to deal with this but the developer of business.txt says it is too complex for most business owners.

Barry Schwartz is not sure how it can injury to have one but I do see Paul’s point about the search engine should be more voguish. Truth is, Google Maps isn’t that chicer, there are constant issues with locations and business within Google Maps being entirely wrong, outdated and simply incorrect.