In this week’s episode, I dig into the mass deletion of over 2,500 Google Business Profiles for car dealerships. For dealers who were affected, I share an update from Google and next steps based on what happened after you were deleted. Check out the full video for all the details - and make sure you never give “owner” access of your GBP to any vendor partner, no matter how hard they press you!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I’m sharing an important update for car dealers - we’re going to talk about the mass deletion of thousands of Google Business Profiles.
For those of you who don’t know, a little over 3 weeks ago, over 2,500 car dealerships woke up to find out that their dealership’s Google Business Profile had ceased to exist. This was’t like a standard suspension - there was no notice, and there was nothing in the GBP back end. Cue the collective freak-out…
To make matters even worse, Google support wasn’t aware of the mass deletion and gave dealers the supremely bad advice of simply setting up a new profile.
I’m not here today to place blame - but it’s now known that it was a single vendor’s fault, and that all of the over 2,500 profiles were manually deleted. Whether that means some person intentionally used the system to delete the profiles or it was a development accident, it really doesn’t matter at this point.
What matters is that Google figured out what had happened and republished all of the affected profiles last week. Yeah, it took some time, but Google is massive and it takes some time to move things along. So let’s talk about what should happen now:
If you were one of the dealerships that had a Google Business Profile deleted, your profile should be back up and running at this point. If you log into the system and your profile is stil llisted as “pending”, you need to contact Google Support. Let your support agent know that your profile was deleted as part of the mass deletion that happened at the beginning of the month, that your profile has been reinstated, but it’s still showing as “pending” in the system. Support will them fix the profile and you’ll be good to go.
If your profile is back but showing that it need to be reverified, you can either follow the prompts to reverify your profile or you can connect with Google Support. I’d suggest connecting with support, if you or your SEO partner aren’t familiar with the new verification process, it’s likely you’ll do something wrong and get suspended. It will be much easier for you to connect with Support. Tell them that you were deleted as part of the mass deletion at the beginning of the month and that your profile was republished, but it’s asking for reverification and you need them to fix that for you. You shouldn’t need to reverify to get the profile back up and running.
If you are one of the dealerships that created a new profile, you’ll likely see both profiles when you log in now. A duplicate GBP can cause all kinds of problems, so you should connect with Support as soon as possible. Tell support your profile was deleted as part of the mass deletion at the beginning of the month and that you set up a new profile. Be very clear that you want the profiles merged, and be even more clear about which profile is your “primary” profile. Tell them you want any new reviews added to the newly created profile to be merged into the old profile.
Finally, this is a textbook example of why you need to be extremely careful with which people and vendors have access to your Google Business Profile. Really, you should be careful with access to all of your dealership’s properties: GBP, Google Analytics, Search Console, social platforms, and anything else you use.
NEVER give ownership access of your dealership’s Google Business Profile to a vendor. Period. When you stop working with a vendor partner, remove their access to whichever platforms that vendor had access to. You should spend a few minutes monthly auditing the accounts that have access to any of your digital properties.
And in the future, if anything like this happens again, don’t jump to conclusions or solutions. Yeah, it’s scary to have your GBP completely disappear, but it’s always better to take the time to talk to several experts before you do anything. If your vendor partners don’t have any insight or advice to share, it’s perfectly OK to talk to other experts in the industry. I’m happy to answer questions any time, and most other experts are the same way. Someone will know what to do and you’ll save yourself even more headaches by not doing the wrong thing.
That’s all the time we have left for this week’s episode, so you know what that means. Put your hand on the screen right here: We totally just high-fived ‘cause you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
