Recent content by SmallBizGeek

Solved it! It was the Keywords Everywhere extension! I disabled it and everything I needed appeared in the SERPs the way it used to.

I'm simply not able to manage access on my own business. This is so strange. For years this has never been a problem, but it's just not possible for me to add another manager to my own business profile. I'm reading this guide but cannot actually progress past the first step How to Add & Remove...

This makes no sense at all. I have less than 10 profiles, and I can't remove myself as a manager from any of them. I'm desperate to revert back to what it was like before. It feels like I have my hands tied behind my back right now.

I've never had that before and I've been a manager of multiple profiles for years. This is the first time I've seen this. All my settings are missing. What is the point of this? I cannot administrate anything in a meaningful way.

I'm clearly a manager on multiple profiles but I don't see any options to remove myself like I could have done before. Why does Google have to make everything so complicated with these terrible decisions?

Yes but I don't believe all the tools are available there

For some time, I noticed that business profiles were edited directly from SERPs. Enter your business name or "google business profile" or certain keywords to trigger the suite of tools, such as "ask for reviews", "q & a" etc. That is no longer the case for me. In fact, I'm going round in...

Hi, A client has changed their address, so I punched in the new address in GMB. The edit is live, uncontested. No postcard, no PIN, no nothing. How is that possible? I do not trust this supposedly live edit. If this is the case, what is stopping me from setting up fake, sham businesses and...

This is a great plugin. I'll be recommending it to clients. I have to ask though, how much of a ranking factor are GMB categories? I've seen some businesses that have no categories whatsoever, yet they do have a ton of reviews.

@Heidi Powell It doesn't surprise me that hibu (aka Yellow Pages) are behind this. I have had issues with them in the past, and they employ all kinds of dirty tricks to hang on to or acquire new business. A sales rep of theirs from Northern Ireland hounded me for about a year trying to sell...

I've had this happen to me too. A review from someone who was not a customer whatsoever, and proceeded to make unsubstantiated claims about my service. At this point, you can only reply to the review as a damage control method, to appease anyone else reading the reviews. Sure, the negative...

This is wrong and annoys me as I have clients whose competitors are doing just this: asking for reviews and offering discounts in return. Furthermore, I have rivals who do this sort of thing all the time. I've never done it and yet Google has removed some genuine reviews that customers left for...

I cannot believe how easy it is to edit public listings. A local business here where I live recently closed, so I marked the business as "closed" on Google Maps. The edit i made did not even go for review in some kind of moderation queue. My edit was live within seconds and the listing was...

Gotcha. I can't import my old content to the new platform, then.

I'm in the process of exporting all my old posts from the Google forum that ran on the "lithium" platform, so that I may import it into their new system. Shouldn't this happen automatically? Nevertheless, I'm following their instructions found here: The Community is moving to new platform...