NEW Google Posts Update - Google Now Considers Certain Google Posts To Be Spam

[Colan Nielsen]

Google just added a new line to their Google Posts help article in the section about "Avoid Spam"

Duplicate photos, posts, videos, and logos

What do you make of this? Does "duplicate photos" refer to stock photos? Are we not able to post the business logo on multiple posts? Only one way to find out

 

[JS Girard]

I suspect "duplicate photos/videos" and "duplicate logos" mean having the same image several times in the photo gallery and/or having the image selected as logo uploaded separately to the gallery. "Duplicate posts" seems fairly straightforward.

 

[Conor Treacy]

I wonder if there's a timeline on the "duplicate posts" end of things. Since posts are now a 6 month period, would re-posting a post from last year (an article for example) still be considered spam.

Sure you can rewrite the content and then link to the article, but I wonder if they are using a "within X period" as a determining factor. We run a script that will pick a random article from the site, pull the description or excerpt and then use that for a Google Post - that COULD fall under a duplicate post situation.

 

[Tim Colling]

I wonder whether "duplicate posts" refers to:

1. Using the same post more than once for a specific Google Business Profile, or
2. Using the same post across multiple Google Business Profiles, or
3. Both of the above

 

[0001q0X]

I don't have any worries that this will be enforced.

 

[koen12344]

I don't have any worries that this will be enforced.

Not so sure. I recently had a customer that suddenly had a lot of posts getting rejected. He was publishing very similar posts and GBP support told him they were getting rejected because they were duplicates.

 

[Norbert Z.]

Is it around one auction or multiple locations? Forgive me for speaking in a foreign language.

 

[fross]

Google just added a new line to their Google Posts help article in the section about "Avoid Spam"

What do you make of this? Does "duplicate photos" refer to stock photos? Are we not able to post the business logo on multiple posts? Only one way to find out

We have clients with multiple locations and post same article and images to each location! Does anyone know if that is considered duplicate? We have not had issue's so far.

 

[Colan Nielsen]

We have clients with multiple locations and post same article and images to each location! Does anyone know if that is considered duplicate? We have not had issue's so far.

I don't think Google would have an issue with that. I think they are more concerned with a single location having 50 of the same posts.

 

[Marc Charette]

Google just added a new line to their Google Posts help article in the section about "Avoid Spam"

What do you make of this? Does "duplicate photos" refer to stock photos? Are we not able to post the business logo on multiple posts? Only one way to find out

Just one more reason to help your clients by ensuring that they get/take plenty of photos and keep it as an in-house stock of images to use. When I do a photo shoot session for my clients, I typically shoot a lot of extra content that that I keep on file for them so that they can purchase on an 'as needed' basis.

This is where having a great relationship with a commercial photographer in your market area, who gets this and can benefit from your guidance is a massive advantage for your clients.

 

[mattstephenskc]

I wonder whether "duplicate posts" refers to:

1. Using the same post more than once for a specific Google Business Profile, or
2. Using the same post across multiple Google Business Profiles, or
3. Both of the above

That is my biggest concern, since most of our updates (posts) apply equally to all our offices.

 

[mattstephenskc]

Not so sure. I recently had a customer that suddenly had a lot of posts getting rejected. He was publishing very similar posts and GBP support told him they were getting rejected because they were duplicates.

I've had my GBP dashboard *tell me* they were rejecting a post, but not actually reject it. It's very buggy.

 

[Jeannie]

I wonder whether "duplicate posts" refers to:

1. Using the same post more than once for a specific Google Business Profile, or
2. Using the same post across multiple Google Business Profiles, or
3. Both of the above

We have the same questions. Additionally, although unlikely, what if it refers to posting the exact content/text/image used on a web page? If the website URL is in Google's index, and they are overloaded with indexing and crawling, in a far stretch, might they be saying we already have this?

 

[mattstephenskc]

I wonder whether "duplicate posts" refers to:

1. Using the same post more than once for a specific Google Business Profile, or
2. Using the same post across multiple Google Business Profiles, or
3. Both of the above

I suspect #2 to be the case. Nearly every time we post a holiday update to our 5 location GBPs, Google sends us an email notifying us that the posts have been removed due to spam violations. They are 100% NOT spam. Google needs to create a better way for users to manage posts for multi-location SABs.

 

[mattstephenskc]

We have the same questions. Additionally, although unlikely, what if it refers to posting the exact content/text/image used on a web page? If the website URL is in Google's index, and they are overloaded with indexing and crawling, in a far stretch, might they be saying we already have this?

That's a good question. It's common for social media managers to cross-post essentially the same content on multiple platforms, and it would be ridiculous for said platforms to penalize them for this.

 

[Chucker]

What about when a business has 3 locations, and I use the same post across all 3 locations that push te same new / service?

 

[garrettkite]

Very interested in this as well. We work with multi-location franchise companies and as a result, we use the same posts for each location as they are applicable to all. If Google deems that a duplicate post is using the same post across multiple GBP listings then that makes it incredibly difficult to provide consistent updates to multi-location businesses like this. I will note that we have seen an increase in rejected posts lately, where the posts still appear publicly on the GBP listings. That may be related or it may be a totally unrelated glitch. Regardless, GBP is becoming a never-ending conundrum for our agency.

 

[mattstephenskc]

Very interested in this as well. We work with multi-location franchise companies and as a result, we use the same posts for each location as they are applicable to all. If Google deems that a duplicate post is using the same post across multiple GBP listings then that makes it incredibly difficult to provide consistent updates to multi-location businesses like this. I will note that we have seen an increase in rejected posts lately, where the posts still appear publicly on the GBP listings. That may be related or it may be a totally unrelated glitch. Regardless, GBP is becoming a never-ending conundrum for our agency.

That's been my experience the last few months: they flag the posts as spam, then either don't actually remove them or they reactivate them. There seem to be some major glitches happening, and their silence on what is a ubiquitous, important issue is telling of their commitment to business and search user customer service.

 

[Ljubica]

I was searching for the guideline that stated that "Duplicate photos, posts, videos, and logos" are considered spam, but then I noticed that the "Avoid spam" section had been removed.

Actually, they have removed a lot of things there. Did they move it to some other page, or are duplicate photos no longer considered spam?

The last snapshot from Nov 27 is with the old content.
Business Profile posts content policy

 

[s_banks]

I was searching for the guideline that stated that "Duplicate photos, posts, videos, and logos" are considered spam, but then I noticed that the "Avoid spam" section had been removed.

Actually, they have removed a lot of things there. Did they move it to some other page, or are duplicate photos no longer considered spam?

The last snapshot from Nov 27 is with the old content.
Business Profile posts content policy

I was looking into this and noticed the change as well. The article is now linking to the Prohibited and restricted content article for map contributions which says:

Gibberish & repetitive content

We don’t allow the posting of repetitive content or gibberish on Google Maps because it dilutes useful information Google Maps provides its users.

This includes:

• Posting the same content multiple times or posting content for the same place from multiple accounts.
• Posting content with no meaning in any language, such as a group of characters.

This makes me think the real issue could be posting duplicate content to 1 business profile. When looking at chain retailers and their multiple locations, I'm seeing the same post across all business profiles, but the post is not repeated within a single profile. Black Friday posts are a good example.