Retailer, All Locations Suspended – Account Level Suspension
A household name with storefronts gets suspended due to suspicious activity. This is the second time for this giant brand to suffer from all locations being suspended.
The Problem: A suspension is bad enough, but combine that with Black Friday being in two weeks and the fact that they have to show an improvement in numbers over the previous year made this an emergency situation. (Side note, they had this exact issue a year prior, almost to the day, due to the GMB Posts they were making.)
The Goal:
Get the locations back on Google Maps as fast as possible.
The Challenge: This was no ordinary account level suspension. After doing our normal process for account level GMB suspensions, we called an owner-swap. We would get immediate responses from Google after submitting a reinstatement request. The subject of these emails read ”Search (WebSpam) Penalty : Reconsideration Request”. WTF!?! Google!?! The link leads to the Google Search Console support page for a manual penalty, which has nothing to do with GMB. Funnily enough, the email stated to read the guidelines and…wait for it…resubmit the reinstatement request! This will create a duplicate reinstatement request and further complicate things. After talking to a few friends at Google, we figured out the proper way to address the situation. We additionally sought out clarifications to the guidelines on how an adult retailer could use GMB Posts to promote themselves. What we found out was that adult products are considered regulated goods. Since Posts are a consumer product, they are in violation of the posts content policy if they advertise a specific adult product or service.
The Resolution: All locations except four were reinstated in 48 hours. Two had to have some pushback and one response even asked for a utility bill even though there was evident Street View of the business at this location – goes to show you the support operator is make-it-or-break-it in some cases. Within a total of four days, we have all locations republished. In those four days, the merchant lost a staggering amount of revenue – more than 50% of a decline over the previous week and a 70% decline over the previous year, for that same time period.
The Testimonial: https://goo.gl/maps/kqiKBduraaXVfHph9 “Our brand went through a horrible nightmare scenario with GMB and it’s still a grand understatement. Luckily, a friend made introductions to Ben. Our experience working with Ben was amazing, because from the start he explained everything and what he said happened exactly as he explained it. Long story short, thanks to Ben’s work and expertise he saved our brand and many millions of dollars in revenue. A real GMB magic maker.”
