SAB listing suspension due to rebranding/closure of brick and mortar locations

[Wary Goose]

Hi, I'm hoping someone can help us with a problem our pest control company has with their rebranding.

They were brick and mortar locations prior to rebranding and all of their GBP listings were were verified. (It was not a bulk-verified dashboard prior to the rebranding, even though they qualified with over 10 locations) As part of the rebranding, brick and mortar locations have been closed and the client will now operate as a service-area business only. Once we remove an address and replace it with a service area, GBP is requiring reverification with a postcard.

There are no longer any addresses to send a postcard to so we're at a loss of what to do.

Any ideas of what we can do other than request help from GBP Support for this issue? (There are multiple users for each location in our Business Group so we're cleaning that up in case that is one of the causes) Should we file reinstatement requests with Support and provide documentation of our rebranding (truck pics, logos, uniforms, etc.) and closure of physical locations?

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

 

[Phil Rozek]

@Wary Goose, were your pages suspended or is it just that the addresses are still showing (and the service areas not showing) unless and until you re-verify? In my experience the latter is all that happens. The page isn't suspended in the meantime, unless maybe you took some other action that led to a suspension.

In any event, though it's against GMB policies, the practical thing to do is just leave the addresses showing and not re-verify. That assumes your pages weren't suspended, of course. If they were suspended and you contact Google, my reading of the tea leaves is you'd have a hard time getting all but one of those pages reinstated. Pest control companies tend to sprinkle their service area with a lot of GMB pages that Google doesn't want them to have in the first place. Not saying that's the case here.)

 

[Wary Goose]

@Wary Goose, were your pages suspended or is it just that the addresses are still showing (and the service areas not showing) unless and until you re-verify? In my experience the latter is all that happens. The page isn't suspended in the meantime, unless maybe you took some other action that led to a suspension.

In any event, though it's against GMB policies, the practical thing to do is just leave the addresses showing and not re-verify. That assumes your pages weren't suspended, of course. If they were suspended and you contact Google, my reading of the tea leaves is you'd have a hard time getting all but one of those pages reinstated. Pest control companies tend to sprinkle their service area with a lot of GMB pages that Google doesn't want them to have in the first place. Not saying that's the case here.)

Hi Phil-

We have one "Disabled" location (we'll have to contact Support about that one), one "Duplicate" (we'll look into that one) and the rest are "Verification Required". I've included a screen snip of the GBP Dashboard.

It looks as if the ones that are "Verification Required" are "Soft Suspended" as we can see them in Maps without addresses, but we can't edit them without reverifying.

Would you recommend contacting Support to have these locations verified? We would like to edit/optimize them when necessary. Or should we just leave them "as-is" and do "public edits"? Thanks again.

 

[Phil Rozek]

That's a tough one, @Wary Goose. I think the least-bad option is to try to get one of the pages re-verified, which you'd need to do by contacting support. That page is your lab chimp. If it doesn't go well, then you leave the other pages soft-suspended for the foreseeable future. But if you can re-verify that one page without needing to be at the old address, then maybe you take the plunge on the other pages.

Again, all of this falls into a real gray area with GMB, so what to do with the options you see is outside of my lane.

 

[Wary Goose]

Thank you for the guidance Phil!