Many businesses are giving Google + a failing grade. Image: Flickr / traftery / CC-BY

The launch of Google+ has been met with exponential growth. This growth is causing a few troubles that could determine how well Google+ does in the future. Lately, the biggest frustration has been Google’s inconsistent handling of business pages.

The initial Google+ business policy

The official policy of Google+, when it comes to business pages, is that they are not allowed. As stated in the official Google+ Name Policy:

Your profile and name must represent one person.
Google Profiles doesn’t support profiles for couples or groups of people. Additionally, you can’t create a profile for a non-person entity such as a pet or business. Google may continue to allow existing profiles that don’t meet these criteria, as long as the profile names are unchanged.

Google+ project manager Christian Oestlien has also indicated via his Google+ profile that:

With so many qualified candidates expressing intense interest in business profiles, we’ve been thinking hard about how to handle this process. Your enthusiasm obligates us to do more to get businesses involved in Google+ in the right way, and we have to do it faster. As a result, we have refocused a few priorities and we expect to have an initial version of businesses profiles up and running for EVERYONE in the next few months. There may be a tiny handful business profiles that will remain in the meantime solely for the purpose of testing how businesses interact with consumers.

In short, Google+ doesn’t want businesses to build profiles yet.

Reality of Google+ business profiles

Despite the instructions to not create business profiles on Google+, hundreds of high-profile businesses did exactly that. Mashable, Ford, Sesame Street, Search Engine Land and hundreds of other brands created pages. After weeks of warning that these pages would be removed, Google finally removed the pages by directing them all to 404 pages. However, Ford’s account was almost immediately restored. Mashable’s founder created a second personal page and continues to post Mashable-style updates. Google+ policy tells individuals they are allowed one account per person, so this workaround is no more in-line with G+ policy than a business page.

What to do about your business

So, if you are a business owner, is it worth it to try to build a Google+ profile that may or may not be removed in the future? If you have an appetite for risk and a strong, brand-advocate fan base, it might be worth trying. However, in the end, your work would likely be better spent building a strong, well-known brand on social networks that are set up for businesses. By waiting, you will have less management work and a better chance of staying on Google’s good side. Staying in-line with terms and conditions, be it on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, FourSquare, Google+ or any other social network, may not get you the most fans, but it helps keep headaches and unexpected results to a minimum.