GMB Penalties & How To Avoid Them | Nozak Consulting

Recently, a major franchise for junk removal found itself on the wrong side of Google’s regulations and as a result they ended up having their entire franchise — nationwide, ENTIRE FRANCHISE’s GMB’s suspended. We’re talking thousands of franchise locations across the nation with literally no Google My Business listing showing when someone searches for them.

Who was the franchise? How did we see this?

We have multiple clients in the junk removal space and noticed that Junk King’s GMB’s stopped showing up in search results. Yay for our clients! Oh Dear GOD for Junk King’s…This happens when you fall behind or violate Google’s GMB guidelines.

We checked out their locations through indexed sites like yp.com and other online directories and saw right away what was going on. Right? (We can’t find them in the GMB and we know they HAVE to be submitted to the aggregators hence they would be findable in other vertical directories — so we searched YP).

And guess what we uncovered? They were geo-modifying their franchises (in order to rank better of course). These Junk King GMBs had city modifiers on their profiles (we spot checked — of course their are too many to check all). This is slightly mis-leading. The business name is Junk King, but each franchise’s GMB had themselves listed as “Junk King Denver” etc… In some cases, this CAN be how your business is named — even in franchising, but that is likely NOT the case with Junk King — even if these franchisees are purchasing Business names such as Junk King of Denver.

We believe this use of Geo Modifiers is against the rules. We know why they did it. Every Tom, Dick, & harry mom & pop is doing it AND probably getting away with it. However, at the size of Junk King it’s best to do these things inline with Google Policies and this, from first glance, looks to be against their naming requirements.

Let’s look at how this happened and how you can avoid this.

Geo Modifiers: What are they?

Geo Modifiers are location specific keywords that you include on your website to help Google understand that your business and services are related to that specific geographic areas — for most businesses this is city specific information that signals you are a good option for search results when someone is looking for the goods and services you provide, specifically in your area.