Hello, I'm looking for some guidance for one of my franchise clients who just had about 120 GMB listings hard suspended. I don't directly deal with the GMB (it's another vendor) but I wanted to help them out. Some background and my own ideas of why I think it might have happened:
- Before the mass suspension there were only 2 franchise listings that were suspended, each requested for re-in statement for about 3-4 weeks with no progress.
- The client is a SAB business that services all customers in their homes or businesses
- I believe most / all of the listings were set up to show the address despite it being a SAB. Apparently the reason is, the franchise locations are staffed during business hours, but they don't technically 'service' customers from their warehouses for the most part.
- There were about 6 categories per listing, some not very relevant in my opinion
- There was no keyword stuffing in the listing titles, although the city name was used for each franchise (because that's the actual franchise's DBA name in each case)
- The industry does seem to have a lot of spam listings
- The vendor who handles the listings had a response from Google shortly after they were all suspended which said something along the lines of: "there is a specific user in the account who has had their access restricted, which caused the whole account to be suspended." is this possible? it just seems very strange to me that one user with access restricted would cause all 120 to go down in the account?
- The account structure: all of the listings were previously managed through one account, in one location group. The master account either had owner or manager access for each of the listings (with some individual franchisees having owner access). There were about 2-3 other users with management access to the location group itself. However, since the suspension, they've recently separated each franchise account away from the master account, and given each franchise owner access in order to try to 'separate the bad apple'. Was this the right path forward?
- At this point, with each franchise account separated, the majority of the listings are still suspended. About 3-4 did come back online, but I really can't figure out why / how those are different from the rest (duplicates perhaps?). What would you suggest we do at this point? Continue to change each separated franchise account to proper SABs by hiding the address? Anything else that would help get these back online?
I really appreciate the help!
- Before the mass suspension there were only 2 franchise listings that were suspended, each requested for re-in statement for about 3-4 weeks with no progress.
- The client is a SAB business that services all customers in their homes or businesses
- I believe most / all of the listings were set up to show the address despite it being a SAB. Apparently the reason is, the franchise locations are staffed during business hours, but they don't technically 'service' customers from their warehouses for the most part.
- There were about 6 categories per listing, some not very relevant in my opinion
- There was no keyword stuffing in the listing titles, although the city name was used for each franchise (because that's the actual franchise's DBA name in each case)
- The industry does seem to have a lot of spam listings
- The vendor who handles the listings had a response from Google shortly after they were all suspended which said something along the lines of: "there is a specific user in the account who has had their access restricted, which caused the whole account to be suspended." is this possible? it just seems very strange to me that one user with access restricted would cause all 120 to go down in the account?
- The account structure: all of the listings were previously managed through one account, in one location group. The master account either had owner or manager access for each of the listings (with some individual franchisees having owner access). There were about 2-3 other users with management access to the location group itself. However, since the suspension, they've recently separated each franchise account away from the master account, and given each franchise owner access in order to try to 'separate the bad apple'. Was this the right path forward?
- At this point, with each franchise account separated, the majority of the listings are still suspended. About 3-4 did come back online, but I really can't figure out why / how those are different from the rest (duplicates perhaps?). What would you suggest we do at this point? Continue to change each separated franchise account to proper SABs by hiding the address? Anything else that would help get these back online?
I really appreciate the help!
