Posts

The three post types

• Updates: general news, content, or short messages.
• Offers: promotions with a start and end date. These can include a coupon code and a "redeem" button.
• Events: tied to a specific date or date range. These can include start/end times and an event link.

Google's hard rule about phone numbers

To avoid the risk of abuse, we do not allow your post content to include a phone number.

This is one of the cleaner explicit prohibitions Google publishes. Many shop-owner posts violate it within their first week. The phone number belongs in the profile's main phone field, not in post copy.

Where posts surface

• Mobile: in the Updates and Overview tabs.
• Desktop: in a "From the owner" section on the right rail of the Knowledge Panel.

Posts are not as prominent as photos or the Products tab. They are an engagement surface for customers who are already looking at the profile, not a discovery surface for customers who have not found it yet.

The 6-month archive rule

Updates posts older than 6 months are archived automatically. Offers and Events follow their own date logic (offers expire when their end date passes; events similarly). Setting a date range can extend visibility.

This means a "we posted weekly for a year" archive is not as visible as it sounds. Most of it is gone from the public view by month seven.

The "post weekly to rank" claim

Google has never published Posts as a ranking factor. They may serve as a small freshness signal in the engagement bucket of Prominence, but no Google document we have found supports a direct ranking lift from posting cadence. Agencies that price weekly posting as a ranking tactic are selling something Google does not endorse.

This does not mean posting is worthless. It means posting should be sold honestly: as customer engagement and a marginal freshness surface, not as a ranking lever. The post-renovation upsell mentioned in the VSL is framed exactly this way.

What we audit for

1. No phone numbers in any post (Google rule violation)
2. Recent post within the last 6 months (so the tab is not visibly stale)
3. Posts use a relevant photo or video, not text only
4. Offers have correct start/end dates and a redemption mechanism
5. No spammy posts repeating the same offer four times in eight weeks
6. Post copy is on-brand, free of grammar errors, and links to legitimate destinations

Sources

• https://support.google.com/business/answer/7342169 · Google Business Profile Help: Add updates (Posts) to your Business Profile.
• https://support.google.com/business/answer/7213077 · Content policy for Posts (the no-phone-numbers rule lives here).