GMB Listing Ownership Hijacked

[Kevin Marshall]

We manage a GMB listing and SEO for a local ServiceMaster franchise. I received a request for ownership from a reputable marketing agency (I don't want to call them out here) who stated they were redesigning their website, and they needed ownership access of the account to setup the functionality with GMB as part of their redesign.

I gave them ownership access to their listing, and they proceeded to make us all managers on the account.

The problem is that I did not verify with the owner that this company is actually doing a redesign before handing over ownership of the GMB account. We spoke with the owner this morning, and I found out that they are not doing a redesign of their website. The owner stated the other agency has been hounding them since 2010 trying to get them to do a redesign with them.

If the other marketing agency won't give us back our ownership access to their GMB listing, is there any other recourse that we have with Google?

 

[Tim Colling]

Wow! That sounds really shady. Is the other agency someone that we would all probably recognize?

 

[Kevin Marshall]

If you've been in the industry awhile, and especially if you work with any ServiceMaster franchises, then there's a good chance you have heard of them before.

 

[abbietorres]

You should definitely call out the agency. Also, GMB has different access levels. I always advise to only have 1 primary owner per account and set everyone else as a manager. You can set someone else an owner (not primary) and still be able to remove them from the account as the primary owner.

Also, if it is an agency then it will be easy for them to transfer ownership back to you... #slimeballs

 

[Tony Wang]

@Kevin Marshall Yes please, definitely call them out here! Not sure why you refer to them as "reputable" because that move disqualifies them in every sense of the word.

And for the record, the actual owner should be the only Primary Owner, no agency should have that status. And you can request ownership from Google if you need to, but it's more trouble than you should have to go through. Demand those guys rightfully return ownership.