Acceptable Google Maps NAP abbreviations & variations

Our Listings Service 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 “123 James Ave” instead of “123 James Avenue”?

As you can probably imagine, this question comes in different nuances and versions but the answer (almost) always boils down to the same thing – 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’s 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 “JSC” vs “J.S.C.” do not affect in any way Google’s ability to recognize these as the same thing for the purposes of business data clustering.

Mike 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’t. In fact, as a percentage of the total number of businesses in Google’s 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

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.