Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I’m sharing exciting news about the new update to Google Business Profile policies! It’s been a bit since Google updated the policies around Google Business Profiles, and last week’s update makes most everything more clear for business owners and marketers. Google has been aggressively fighting spam and fake listings recently, resulting in a lot of legitimate businesses seeing suspensions. They were told that they violated GBP policies, but the policies weren’t super clear and it was difficult to dig through all the regulations.
Last week, Google updated the policies, and it’s definitely a lot easier to understand the guidelines now. The new policies page even has separate sections that cover prohibited and restricted content, account level restrictions, eligibility, ownership, posting restrictions, and reasons submitted content may be rejected.
For what’s probably the first time ever, Google is spelling out why you might lose access to a GBP listing. It’s actually clearly stated that if a Google account isn’t in good standing – whether that’s from repeated GBP abuses or even issues with other Google products – the “merchant must take steps to fix the issue before they can access their Google Business Profile”
It also clearly states that if an account is restricted, all GBPs associated with that account will be suspended.
This will be so much more helpful for businesses that get suspended. As you probably know from past episodes, I’m a platinum level Product Expert on the GBP community forum, and the most common issue we help with on the forum is suspended listings.
Head over to bit.ly/gbp-policy-update to read the new info yourself – if you do Local SEO in any capacity, this should be required reading!
That’s all the time we’ve got 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.
