For the past few weeks, there have been reports via the Local Search Forum that Google has been removing emojis and special characters from business names within Google Business Profiles. This means if you try to add an emoji for your name to stand out in the Google local listings, Google may remove that emoji.
Marcin Karwowski posted about this in the forums, he said, "I just noticed that a while ago a huge number of business owners received an email with the same content, that their name was updated and the emoticon was removed from the name. Apparently, Google finally decided to clean it up and removed emojis from names en masse. It's a beautiful day if emoticons in company names finally disappear."
Here is a screenshot of a notice he received from Google about Google Business Profiles removing an emoji from the business name:
Darren Shaw said shortly after that he noticed this also with special characters. Shaw wrote, "I got a notification today about an "®" being removed from a name. This client needs that in their name, though."
Google has a history of adding and removing emojis from the search results, but the local space has been somewhat left alone from those decisions - that is until now.
Forum discussion at Local Search Forum.
