Sourced by Jorge Silva, QA Engineer, RelevantAds – LocalSplash.

Google added the ability for businesses to supply custom links to their Google Places business profile page. Here is an example with the feature in yellow highlight.

Google Maps Places Links

This can be set by supplying attribute in Google Places; the hyperlink text is defined as the attribute name and the reference is set by the attribute value.

Google Maps Places Links

Since “Google Local Business Center” is now renamed to Google Places, we figured a good name for this feature is Google PlaceLinks. The hyperlink is natural, meaning it is does not indicate no-follow, and opens into a new browser window; though we aren’t really expecting to see a PageRank benefit. More likely, we may hope to find a fast track to getting the URL to appear as an additional web reference citation, a local SEO benefit. Though that doesn’t seem to necessarily occur for URLs supplied as the business website.

We are going to start using PlaceLinks to promote specials or coupons and further highlight some of the permalinks on 3rd party destinations; such as Yelp, Facebook and Twitter.