Victim of Negative "SEO" attack on our listings. Anyone else seen it?

[vinchenson]

Hello, I'll try to summarize what we have been experiencing in order to maybe find someone else with the same issue and also warn you guys so it doesn't happen to you.

Summarizing what we have been experiencing in the last month.

• A brand with multiple locations through the US.
• Rankings start to drop, massively.
• We start to get 2-3 listings suspended per day. The reason they give is "Content that violates our policies isn't allowed"
• For many days we start breaking our brains re-reading the policies trying to find what could be the issue. Everytime we appeal with our hypothesis fixed they deny. Same for re-appeals.
• More and more listings keep geting suspended even though we are almost sure we don't break any policy.

Today one team member finds something weird for the listings that are still alive from this brand.

• For all the non-yet suspended listings we have, they all appear to be located on an island where google street view has barely passed.
• Our listings, from the administrator panel, still show our correct addres.
• We never received any single email about any edit being live from google maps suggestions.
• We don't see the typical "this has been updated by google" in the business settings neither.

We found this out of coincidence.

It looks like anyone instead of suggesting to change the address from google maps, suggested to change the "pin" where that address is located.
In the administrator panel everything looks fine, but instead the listing appears live on an island.

Now we have like 15+ listings in different islands that will get suspended this week.

Anyone experienced this?

 

[bobbyh]

I've seen this discussed a lot:

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Are you "moving the pin back"? That causes a problem: "Pro tip if your pin gets moved: do NOT move it back in the NMX (Google’s in-serp GBP editor). Instead, use “suggest an edit” in Google Maps using a Google account that is not an owner/manager of the profile. This will sidestep the suspension risk."

 

[liftmarketinggroup]

Yuck. Check out this thread.

 

[vinchenson]

I'm going to explain the aftermath of what happened after I commented on #1 when we found about this.

It was a daily fight vs the spammer/spammers ever since. We would suggest from outside our listings the pin swap, google would accept it, the spammer would come back 2h later and move the pin, etc. 4 times a day of suggestions correcting 40 listings.

3 days ago he managed to not only pin swap us, also change our listings names too. Google would just accept any of his suggestions.

We had 40+ listings under our brand name + location (we have dba for ech one of them) and he managed to change all the listings names to a short version of our first word of brand name.

Imagine: "coca cola offices new york" he would change all our listings for "coca" "coc" "co ca" etc. and google would just accept it.

He then managed to mark all our listings as duplicate of 1 of them and now everything is gone. 39 listings gone.

Insane how google works tbh and how can some maniac screw a whole business just out of hatred or god knows what and google just allows it.