Cleaning Up Spam Listings, Anything I Can Learn in the Process?

[Gilad Gafni]

I entered a category (HVAC) with a good amount of spam listings and am about to help Google with the cleanup and was wondering, maybe there's something I should learn from them before I make them disappear?

Does it make sense trying to study how are GMBs with no websites, no reviews, no citations, no posts, not even a real address (non-existent suite numbers) able to rank with no effort, while other, 100% real legitimate businesses struggle? (I currently see 3 listings/locations around town for a non-existent business, all of which fall under the same outline described above)

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Hey @gill Reverse engineering is a good idea. In this case I can save you time and tell you that 90% of the reason for what you are seeing is that Google continues to put a ton of ranking points into keywords in the business name on GMB. Do the examples you are seeing fall into that scenario?

 

[Ian Hammond]

@gill I Would agree with Colan here. It seems like the only real lesson is that keyword stuffing your GMB listing name works. A secondary one would be that proximity to searcher still matters a ton--even if it shouldn't for the given client (say a lawyer or HVAC co). ...