GMB Adding Irrelevant Services in Bulk

[djcoppedge]

We manage listings for a construction (new home builder) company and last week we noticed that a bunch of new categories were added to 'Services' "based on feedback from customers and other Google sources". Some of these categories aren't related to the construction world at all. They are health care related. In fact, a few listings even had Outpatient Surgery listed.

There is an option for us to accept changes, in which, we should see them in the 'Google Updates' tab but they don't appear there. From what we can tell there is no way for us to edit these in bulk. We've tried exporting and exporting with Google Updates and nothing is there with these new service categories. A few days ago, we manually went into each listing (a couple hundred) and deleted the added services. We noticed they are all back again today

Google isn't waiting for us to accept changes either. They are making them live in the Mobile SERP which could cause for a confusing UX.

Anyone else seeing this with their listings? Any insights here would be greatly appreciated.

 

[krystaltaing]

Hey Dave,

I haven't seen this before but Ryan shared this same example on the GMB forum. I am trying to get more information on this and will respond back.

Thanks!

 

[SEO-learner-brandon]

Hey Dave,
This is also something I've seen with a couple of listings I help manage as well. I'll be watching the thread

 

[karendauncey]

Did you find a solution to this? I have had this happen to quite a few listings recently, on one listing Google have added 20+ random categories, it appears these are all keywords on the website but some of them wouldn't be a category eg. free quote. This seems to be happening a lot at the moment across multiple clients.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Hi @karendauncey Google adds information to Google My Business by scraping the web. They do this for the services section. The services in your screenshot are web crawled from trusted websites. If you go in and edit these and remove them, they will not be added back a second time.

 

[karendauncey]

Thanks so much for the reply, I shall remove them. It seems crazy as they are all live and no notification from GMB either.