With the crisis around the Corona virus, many businesses are closed either by force or voluntarily. Changing your opening hours on Google My Business (GMB) to notify customers of your changed hours of operation is not only a nice gesture to your following, but also great for your ranking in Google Search because active business entries in Google My Business are favoured over stale ones.
However, with rules and regulations changing over days, keeping up with the changed business hours is a little time consuming. There is also an option to mark your business as “temporarily closed”… Wouldn’t that do the trick too or does it affect your rating on Google negatively?
In light of the Corona crisis, Google has changed the way it interprets these settings and due to these changes it is safe to mark your business as “temporarily closed” if it’s for more than two weeks.
Google will not drop you from search results and will not filter your business out just because it is closed. While it used to do this to more accurately reflect the state of businesses, there are so many shops that are closed now, that they changed this behavior and better serve the businesses during this crisis.
Source: searchengineland.com/
Christian Peper 