Recent content by JoyHawkins

Can you share the industry and what type of query it is? Is it one that contains a city name?

To clarify, the problems are all with Incognito but it's not actually reflecting reality which is why I'm asking if you are able to reproduce it while logged in to a Google account or if your actual leads are down? If you aren't familiar with the issue I'm referring to, do a Google search for...

Can you manually check a few pins while logged in from that location and see if what you see matches what the tool is showing? Incognito is becoming insanely innacurate lately. Have you seen a drop in traffic/leads that corresponds with the ranking drop?

What tool are you using? Can you share a few examples of how ranking looked a month ago vs now?

I haven't seen evidence yet that it's happening for local pack rankings though. All those articles are referring to organic.

I'm not seeing anything as of yet. Are you seeing this yourself by searching in a browser, or is a tool showing you the fluctuation?

Correct, it only does maps. I think with the current state of things, it's probably the best we have. There isn't a single rank tracker I really trust right now that is reporting on organic. At least with Maps, it's not being poisoned the way organic is.

Yes we have been experiencing the same thing. We are currently using Local Falcon for most things.

@Digital Jedi what type of business did you get this option on? I have yet to see it.

I've heard multiple reports of this happening. It's definitely a new thing. Did your volume bounce back after 3 weeks?

Reposting this thread we got on our subreddit. This user is saying they are seeing service area pages (pages targeting a specific city with the goal to rank organically in that city) getting hit by the August 2026 Spam Update. Anyone here seeing this? Examples?

I'm definitely seeing this with human users as well although it's possible it might be more extreme with incognito sessions. That would be a very tough study to do. Not sure I have a million humans sitting around that can help lol. Schieler's study was done by humans though and he came to the...

So if you rank high in the local pack, and your listing links to a page that ranks organically for that same keyword, that organic ranking will be worse because Google basically filters it out as already being on the page. I've done videos and wrote about this (the diversity update) but I'm not...

I would use the same account.

I have Google transfer reviews between profiles all the time. They also will transfer them for an SAB who has moved since they are told to create a brand new profile. You want a different support agent. I would create a new case or post on the GBP community.