Category: Google Maps

Google released spam and fraud prevention stats for Google Maps and local search. In short, Google blocked 21% more reviews, 5% more photos, 40% more videos, and 5% more fake business profiles in 2022 than they did in 2021.

Google Business Profiles seems to allow some restaurants to copy a menu that it thinks it pulled for that restaurant from another source and use that copied menu to start to build your own menu in Google Business Profiles.

It looks like review spammers are using ChatGPT and other AI tools to generate fake reviews. These reviews are being posted in Google Business Profile local listings and causing a headache for small businesses.

Google Business Profiles seems to have launched a new manage menu feature for restaurants in the web version of the business profile tool. It opens a “your menu on Google” box that lets you either manually build your custom menu in Google or link to y…

Google is testing showing only one star in the local pack in the search results. This is instead of showing five stars with some of those stars filled in with yellow. I am not seeing the single star partially filled up, but all those businesses may ha…

Google has updated the industry and services selector or picker tool within the Google Local Service Ads interface. This makes it a bit faster to find and activate your business’s services and industries.

Google Business Profiles lets you see what business listings offer service-wise, they’ve been doing this for a while now, and now they seem to impact your local rankings. But what is new and scary is that Google is making up pricing for your services t…

Google may be testing a new search result snippet that blends a typical search result snippet with a local snippet result. This one has the favicon, sitename, URL, title and image but it removed the description portion and replaced it with local featu…

Google may have a bug, it is a confirmed bug according to some local SEOs, where a bunch of businesses are seeing a notice in Google Search that “your business is not visible to customers” in Google Search or Google Maps.

Google now lets you report some reviews left on Local Service Ads. You can report the normal Google Business Profile reviews, but not the verified reviews but at least it is a start.

Google may show similar businesses or restaurants in the local business listing of a competing business or restaurant. This “similar to” section may show up based on your previous search or visit history.

Google, during some of the verification workflow with your Google Business Profile may ask for your BBB, Better Business Bureau, listing page. Google is asking to provide a link to your company information the Better Business Bureau.

Google now lets some reviewers leave reviews specifically recommending dishes from that restaurant. Customers can manually add the foods and dishes they recommend at that restaurant.

Google is now showing products that businesses add through the Google Business Profile manager directly in Google Shopping search results. I was not sure if this is new, but it seems most local SEOs think it is, so I am sharing it here.

Google has made a couple of updates to the Google Maps User Contributed Content Policy around prohibited and restricted content. Specifically, Google updated the definition of personal information under the Civil discourse section and fake engagement u…

Google is testing a few interfaces for the Google Posts and updates in the local interfaces. One is to overlay the Google updates in the images for the business listing and the other is to show a “more posts” button in the Google Posts overlay in Goog…

The Google Maps app for Android has seem to add a new tab to manage your business profile(s). The tab shows a store icon with the word “Business” below it. Clicking it, lets you manage your Google Business Profile listing directly in the app.

Google Business Profiles lets you access and edit your business profile from web search (like it or not) and recently, Google has been testing showing a “see photos” button in addition to the normal “add photos” button.

Joy Hawkins and friends re-did a study they did years ago to discover that now the services you add to your Google Business Profiles now have an impact on your local rankings – at least way more than it did in 2019.

Last June, Google began testing a “profile strength” widget or status icon that shows you if you need to do more with your Google Business Profile. Well, that just went live on Friday and seemed to be fully rolled out. But many local SEOs are not hap…