Listing Catastrophe: Dealing with Agency-Wide Suspensions - Seeking Advice!

[Jaimie S]

Hey everyone,

The dreaded has happened, all listings inside our agency account have suspended. Has anyone else had this or have advice on how to go about this? 2000+ listings went at once.

 

[JS Girard]

It happened at my agency prior to my arrival. This is your account that got suspended. According to my former boss' account, you will have to get every single profile reinstated separately. I do not know, however, whether and how you should get the agency account reinstated first (she didn't talk about that aspect). I know you cannot get a profile reinstated if it's in a suspended account (that frustrated us in one case where the client's account got suspended just this spring).

 

[Jaimie S]

It happened at my agency prior to my arrival. This is your account that got suspended. According to my former boss' account, you will have to get every single profile reinstated separately. I do not know, however, whether and how you should get the agency account reinstated first (she didn't talk about that aspect). I know you cannot get a profile reinstated if it's in a suspended account (that frustrated us in one case where the client's account got suspended just this spring).

 

[Jaimie S]

The agency itself is still fully accessible with no notice of suspension it’s just every account inside so we are unsure where to go to get it resolved at the agency level so we are continuing to look for options there.

Thank you for sharing!

 

[JS Girard]

I do wish I could provide more specific insight. We also manage a large amount of profiles and this is a nightmare scenario that haunts my nights.

 

[BenFisher]

Unfortunately, you have to do them individually, the bigger issue is hunting dow a bad actor in the account, that is most likely what triggered it. There is a 10 or more option on the reinstatement form too.

 

[Jaimie S]

Unfortunately, you have to do them individually, the bigger issue is hunting dow a bad actor in the account, that is most likely what triggered it. There is a 10 or more option on the reinstatement form too.

Thanks Ben,
A bad actor as in an agency user or a specific listing?
And as previous poster mentioned is then the issue resolving the ‘bad actor’ first before going through reinstatement for the individual listings?

 

[BenFisher]

It can be either actually, kinda have to hunt for it and the date of the suspensions may give you some insight.

You can attempt a reinstate of one or more and see if they get approved.

This is quite a complex case btw.

 

[Jaimie S]

It can be either actually, kinda have to hunt for it and the date of the suspensions may give you some insight.

You can attempt a reinstate of one or more and see if they get approved.

This is quite a complex case btw.

Yes a complex and large issue, we avoided using an agency account for such a long time for this reason. Is there somewhere different we can reach out to for support outside of the submitting the reinstatement for 10+ accounts?

 

[Jaimie S]

@Colan Nielsen @JoyHawkins Do you have any further advice on how to manage, anything would be much appreciated!

 

[lonerangerseo]

This is scary and sorry this has happened to you - I hope it is resolved as quicky as possible and Google provide some common sense support.

I have previously thought and now will seriously consider setting up several different google accounts to manage listings, no more than 10 on one account for example, so if one gets suspended it doesn't take out our entire business!

 

[Jaimie S]

This is scary and sorry this has happened to you - I hope it is resolved as quicky as possible and Google provide some common sense support.

I have previously thought and now will seriously consider setting up several different google accounts to manage listings, no more than 10 on one account for example, so if one gets suspended it doesn't take out our entire business!

This is also how we manage listings, we were trialling the agency account. Lucky for us we hadn't fully migrated. There were many advantageous to the smoothness of using the agency but with no extra support it doesn't look worth it and we won't go back to using it!

 

[Jaimie S]

This is also how we manage listings, we were trialling the agency account. Lucky for us we hadn't fully migrated. There were many advantageous to the smoothness of using the agency but with no extra support it doesn't look worth it and we won't go back to using it!

And we rarely had a whole account go down with 10 per accounts. So this is big!

 

[Jaimie S]

It can be either actually, kinda have to hunt for it and the date of the suspensions may give you some insight.

You can attempt a reinstate of one or more and see if they get approved.

This is quite a complex case btw.

Could a user reporting 20 listings as spam within a 2 hour time frame (actual legitimate spam) be the likely culprit?

 

[JoyHawkins]

Could a user reporting 20 listings as spam within a 2 hour time frame (actual legitimate spam) be the likely culprit?

Yep, this is probably what did it. We don't allow any of our employees to suggest any edits whatsoever using their work google account.

Remove that employee from your agency account and file for reinstatement.

 

[Jaimie S]

Yep, this is probably what did it. We don't allow any of our employees to suggest any edits whatsoever using their work google account.

Remove that employee from your agency account and file for reinstatement.

Thanks Joy, much appreciated. We also haven't allowed that previously, but this user didn't realise (facepalm).

 

[Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR]

If there are too many editing suggets, asked questions, reviews, review answers, or other types of activities in the business account, it can trigger a spam prevention system. Because having 2000 accounts in a single email is exceptional for their systems.

 

[lonerangerseo]

Thanks Joy, much appreciated. We also haven't allowed that previously, but this user didn't realise (facepalm).

Just to clarify, your employee was marking competitor listings as spam using the suggest edit feature..is that right?

 

[Tifinie Stiff]

Yep, this is probably what did it. We don't allow any of our employees to suggest any edits whatsoever using their work google account.

Remove that employee from your agency account and file for reinstatement.

Hi Joy, if a client flags these reviews from their own verified account do they risk they also risk this happening? What if the reviews are true spam reviews, like bots that Google hasn't caught? Also, what if they're reporting from the review reporting tool and not just from a listing itself?

 

[JS Girard]

Yep, this is probably what did it. We don't allow any of our employees to suggest any edits whatsoever using their work google account.

Remove that employee from your agency account and file for reinstatement.

I'm a little surprised since I've often gone on suggestion waves before, but I've built a significant backdrop of contributions (ca. 4k points). I always tell my coworkers to not do it, but that's because if they do 1) they multi-report the same thing from that account and b) that self-spams the account with the google maps emails.