Talking to Former Head of GBP - AMA!

[Andrew Shotland]

Hey, I am interviewing one of the former heads of Google Business Profiles tomorrow morning PDT. I want to dig into all about how GBP works behind the scenes. What do you want to know?

 

[Giovanni Rosso]

Ciao,

Thank you for the opportunity and congratulations on the initiative.

There would be many, many questions but I am a photographer and I would like to focus on images and their management, even though I would have many questions not only about photographs.

I would like to understand how long they want to keep this ugly thing active and if they want to put this format in order? and which order?

Street View images are now obsolete in most cases for a Business Profile and the update frequency does not reflect the image quality required for a Business Profile. I understand that it's different on mobile but the problem of obsolete Street Views remains.

So I would like to understand if they want to give greater control and greater management possibilities to the images on a Business Profile.

A thousand thanks

Giovanni

 

[mblumenthal]

When there is a bug how do they decide to prioritize fixing it?

There have been some bugs (features?) that seem to persist these days for a very long time, why is that?

Over the past two years, it appears that they effectively drove (forced?) virtually every SAB in the world through their new verification process. Is that perception accurate? Why?

Google has apparently lost the ability to recover reviews when a business has been reinstated (with a new cid). This is an internal ability that was added a number of years ago. How can they lose this ability? Given the number of suspensions it seems more critical than ever.

Some bugs are actually features. For example the ability to for a local guide to move a location has led to the black hat mass movement of competitor pins quite a ways. This has persisted for at least 5 months. Why does Google trust a Local guide more than an owner in this situation? Why has such a critical “bug/feature” taken so long to fix?

 

[Andrew Shotland]

Thanks Mike. I spoke with our mutual friend yesterday and recorded the whole thing. He definitely had insights into the reviews stuff - TLDR it's often a case of the baby getting thrown out with the spam removal bath water.

I'll follow up re the pin movement stuff.

I'll likely publish the interview some time next week.

 

[Aleksandar Micev]

It would be great if you can share it here, or feel free to ping me. Tnx

 

[Brian - TGL]

@Andrew Shotland where can we keep an eye out for the interview to be published?

 

[Andrew Shotland]

@Andrew Shotland where can we keep an eye out for the interview to be published?

I'll update this thread when I publish it