After a GMB suspension, do rankings usually return?

[Marie Haynes]

I thought this was an interesting discussion.

Ben says he's had a few cases where there was a GMB suspension and then, after being reinstated, rankings took a while to return to normal levels. Joy and Jason chimed in saying this has not been their experience.

I'm wondering whether in Ben's case the things that caused the suspension were previously artificially boosting rankings? For example if the listing previously had loads of fake reviews, once those reviews were removed, that would remove a bit of a ranking boost.

What have you guys seen?

 

[JoyHawkins]

Hey Marie,

We had an account suspension last summer. One of my employees had his account suspended (wrongly) and it was fixed within a few days. It caused soft suspensions for about 2 dozen listings and a hard suspension for Sterling Sky's listing. Our findings (which I reported at the last LocalU event) were that rankings literally bounced back to where they were before in both cases. Screenshots below.

We also did a survey at the event to poll the audience to see what others thought about this. Here are the results of that:

 

[Matt Casady]

I had a few listings get hard suspensions and then reinstated a few days later from the short names bug last week and their rankings bounced right back as well.

 

[Marie Haynes]

Interesting! I am betting that this is similar to manual actions for other things like unnatural links or pure spam.

If you get a pure spam penalty because you bought a domain name that was previously used for spam, and then you get the penalty lifted, your site should have no problem ranking normally. But, if you got an unnatural links manual action, you likely will have trouble ranking well afterwards. This is not because there is a stigma of some sort on the site, but rather, those unnatural links were artificially propping up rankings before. Also, those unnatural links can be taken into account in other algorithms as well.

So, I think that in cases where a GMB reinstatement results in lower rankings, most likely the thing that caused the suspension was helping to artificially boost rankings.

 

[JoyHawkins]

So, I think that in cases where a GMB reinstatement results in lower rankings, most likely the thing that caused the suspension was helping to artificially boost rankings.

This could definitely happen if you were adding keywords to the business name and then removed them to get reinstated.