Manual Penalties and Google Business Support on Suspended Listings

[timcapper]

So this is being reported more and more often to "not" be something.

Users who have a suspended business page and have contacted business support are occasional getting the advise from business support, to submit their website for reconsideration.

Which would imply that the website is under a manual Google penalty and they would have to rectify the issue and then make reconsideration request to have the penalty removed via Google search console.

Yet when I have asked the user to check their Search Console, there is no manual penalty showing.

So what is going on ?

We know that Google has a penalty interface that they can look at, but why would business support have access?

Why is business support saying this, when there are no manual penalties showing in search console, to be reconsidered?

A business in the real world should not be penalized for something in the online world. Should business support not say, remove your website link as there is a problem with your website, and then re-instate the business listing.


I have heard some weird things come out of business support, but this is taking the biscuit, and its no longer a one off, but becoming frequent.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Users who have a suspended business page and have contacted business support are occasional getting the advise from business support, to submit their website for reconsideration.

Which would imply that the website is under a manual Google penalty and they would have to rectify the issue and then make reconsideration request to have the penalty removed via Google search console.

Yet when I have asked the user to check their Search Console, there is no manual penalty showing.

Seems to me that support is probably saying "submit you business page" but the user hears "website" or mistakenly refers to it that way? I've had SMBs call their GMB their site before.

But I have not seen the posts you are referring to. Think that could be it?

 

[Colan Nielsen]

This is very interesting Tim. Wouldn't this happening be of a similar logic to when we see pages get suspended for using a URL that redirects?

 

[shanedrumm]

Why are sites getting manual penalties?

 

[timcapper]

So I just had word back and one part of the issue is a manual penalty.

User needs to submit recon request for website, get the penalty removed and then apply for reinstatement on the GMB page.

So GMB support must have access to the Manual Penalty interface.

 

[timcapper]

Hi Everyone

After looking into this and trying to help the user, it has become clear that only one small piece of the puzzle is the manual penalty.

There are ownership issues, duplicate issues on the GMB page, with the manual penalty being one more piece to the suspension.

Having asked the user to connect his site to Search Console ( both domains as is is not canonicolised ) there is indeed a manual penalty for Pure Spam.

This would actually make sense for GMB to mention this to user to try and rectify as why would Google want to link from their own property to a site that has a penalty for Pure Spam.

Looking into it for the user, at the moment I suspect it is from a bad use of a redirect from another of their rental sites.

As I also understand it now. If the user corrected the problems with their GMB page, this would be reinstated without the link to website. The website link could then be added once penalty issue had been resolved.



So the manual penalty is one part of the problem, not the whole part of the problem.