New: Google eyes VERY closely profiles that are removed from an account.

[JS Girard]

We've now have at least four different instances within two months of pushing a SAB out of our account (either on accident or because we created it and the owner didn't want to actually take possession of it when they stopped working with us), and vanishing very soon after. This was not always case: we have had instances of accidental releases in the past that we were able to get back.

I always knew unowned profiles were very more sensitive to being deleted, but these were profiles with lots of signals and reviews, associated webpages, no duplicates etc. Earlier today I released one because it turned out the clients already had a profile with reviews. I immediately made a suggestion for merging it, but it disappeared before the edit could even be approved or rejected!

Has anyone else noticed something similar going on with ownerless SABs?

 

[keyserholiday]

Google doesn't auto-remove unclaimed SABs. I know there was a glitch when a business was removed from an agency dashboard, it was getting deleted by Google.

 

[JS Girard]

Google doesn't auto-remove unclaimed SABs. I know there was a glitch when a business was removed from an agency dashboard, it was getting deleted by Google.

Oh damn. I don't remember ever seeing articles about this. Is this glitch resolved? 'cause as I noted above, this happened just last Thursday.

Do you have any further details on this?

 

[JS Girard]

So, I had a talk with (French-language) Support this morning, and here's what I was told:

Google has introduced an algorithm at some point (I didn't think to ask) that specifically examines any profile that becomes ownerless because it was removed from its owner's profile. I was told that they couldn't release details "because of actions by certain users".

I think it's reasonable to interpret this language and the actual results as meaning that this is an extremely aggressive antispam algorithm which will aggressively delete the profile over the smallest of issues.

So it's not that Google systematically deletes these profiles, but it's... well, kinda close in a way.