Can google see that you have a voip phone even if you have a geograhic number ?

[leves]

Can google see that you have a *voip phone even if you have a geographic number, and if so does google prefer you have a physical land line when it comes to ranking a business in the local pack ?

*voice over ip - basically means you dont have a hard wired telephone line, but instead connect to a phone system over the internet, its quite common nowadays as it provides lots more flexibility)

 

[chadkimball]

From our testing we know that google does detect what type of phone number it is, and uses this information for different purposes. I don't think they have a problem with voip numbers in general, but often they don't allow voip numbers for google account verification, or phone verification of a listing, it will often kick out an error message if you try to use voip for these things. Other than that I dont think google cares what type of number you use.

The other issue with voip numbers is sometimes providers recycle them too quickly, so sometimes you'll end up with a phone number that has already been used for another business listing on google, or already been used to verify a google account or something, so you want to be careful of the history of the phone number in this case. Frequently a quick google search of the number will show if it has belonged to someone else or some other business, in that case get a different number or you'll have issues with citations, verification, etc..

 

[James Watt]

To add to Chad's good advice, I'd also suggest hooking up the number and waiting a week or two before posting it anywhere. I've had forwarding numbers (and even Google voice numbers) that didn't show up anywhere online, but that had apparently been used in other ways, and had a bunch of junk calls coming through. It's worth a little time to make sure the number won't aggravate you with a bunch of junk calls before starting to seed it around the internet.