I am hearing reports of two separate increases or sudden spikes across both Google Search Console and Google My Business. Some are reporting that within Google Search Console there has been a sudden spike in errors within the error reports. And some are reporting massive increases in suspension notifications within Google My Business.
Google Search Console Errors
I've been seeing numerous reports from SEOs that they are receiving a large spike in error notifications within Google Search Console from their client accounts. The spike is more than normal and thus they are wondering if they should ignore the notifications and wait it out to see if the dust settles or take action and make changes.
Dawn Anderson is one of the people who posted about it on Twitter and there are many responses that confirm what she is seeing.
Yep - only a couple which I investigated but didn’t seem to be correct!
— Alexandra Severn (@digitalex7) June 14, 2019
yep getting hammered with a whole bunch of interesting "errors"
— Richard🦜 (@Rick_BarK) June 13, 2019
Big time - over 200 false-positives (not actual errors) in the last 36 hours across 65 sites, some mobile (3 per page) handful of unparseables - really tedious to deal with
— Peter Mindenhall (@PeterMindenhall) June 13, 2019
Now that you mention it. I'm seeing way more in past week than I have in the last couple of months.
— jesse ringer (@jringer604) June 13, 2019
I am not sure if you should wait these out, it might just be that Google dialed up the error reporting - maybe mostly around mobile first indexing? I am not sure, but you should probably look into these errors.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
Google My Business Suspensions
It appears Google is finally cracking down on fake virtual offices in Google Maps. Ben Fisher posted on Twitter "Google My Business PSA: I am seeing a rise in all profiles in an account getting suspended due to having a Virtual Office profile in it. Beware, if your fake Virtual Office gets reported as spam, all of your profiles are at risk."
Joe Youngblood posted a screen shot of suspensions he saw that were actually real brick and mortar stores, so something is off:
Just noticed a bunch got suspended in my account over the last hour, none of our clients are in VO's and these are all separate. Some of the suspended listings still appear in search/maps, some don't.
— Joe Youngblood (@YoungbloodJoe) June 12, 2019
cc @JoyanneHawkins @keyserholiday @mblumenthal any ideas what's going on?!?! pic.twitter.com/VKtkxXFywi
Looks like an account suspension. So a user gets suspended and every listing they are on gets suspended in their account. Are the listings unverified (the ones that are still live) or do they appear as verified when you see them on Maps?
— Joy Hawkins (@JoyanneHawkins) June 12, 2019
It seems the local SEO community is happy that Google is doing something about this finally...
Forum discussion at Twitter.
