About a year ago, Google revamped the Google Local Business Center and renamed it Google Places, part of that was introducing Google "Tags."
A new, simple way to advertise: For just $25 per month, businesses in select cities can make their listings stand out on Google.com and Google Maps with Tags. As of today, we're rolling out Tags to three new cities - Austin, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. - in addition to ongoing availability in Houston and San Jose, CA. In the coming weeks we'll also be introducing Tags in Chicago, San Diego, Seattle, Boulder and San Francisco.
You can see the example of Tags on the picture above.
In September we reported that Google was aggressively pushing tags as a Google ad option. Then in October, they pulled the ability for the website URL tag option, which made it a lot less useful.
Then last week, Google announced the end of tags. Google said:
We've made a decision to shift our efforts toward other present and future product offerings for local businesses, and will be discontinuing this trial. To that end, we've now halted new signups and will be working with existing participating businesses over the coming weeks to help them meet their marketing needs with other Google products where possible.We've learned a lot from our Tags trial and will take that knowledge into account as we continue to find the best ways to serve users and local businesses alike. Lastly, we want to thank all of the businesses that were part of our Tags trial, and we hope we can meet their advertising needs with one of our existing products.
Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.
