New Google Business Profile categories:

• Physical rehabilitation center
• psychosocial therapist
• rental car return location
• wine and cable supplier

Fake Reviews Crackdown in USA

• They’ve been cracking down on people that buy positive or fake reviews
• if your website has a plugin that filters reviews, like it only shows good ones, and you say “here are ALL my reviews” then you are falsifying information
• In England, Google has been rolling out a new thing where if it thinks you have fake reviews, they will remove them and leave a message at the top of your listing saying “Suspected fake reviews were recently removed from this place”
• The new notice will undoubtedly have some false positives.

Bugs

• Delays in GBP reinstatements
• review reporting tool not functioning properly
• lost reviews after a suspension
• Q&A turned off for some south Asian countries

Q: If you get a fake 1 star review, how often should you try reporting it to get it removed?

Twice. After that it is there to stay. Can use the community forum and review tool
Review Support: https://support.google.com/business/workflow/9945796

If you move your location to another zip code, you’ll likely get suspended. Have your paperwork ready ahead of time. If you’re a home business (no signage), change the registry.

August Core Update

• rollout completed September 3
• increased emphasis on quality content
• a shift to user-centric content and third party trust (Reddit is getting very influential)
• In some cases (like with Ian Howells), the core updates killed traffic until the next update revived it. In March, traffic went to almost zero, then in August it boosted back up.
• Taleb Kabbara did an experiment where permalinks with keywords were swapped out with numeric values. Traffic flew up because it was previously overoptimized.
• “Link Whisper” is a WordPress plugin that automatically adds internal links with exact match keyword anchors. Yan tested, he had 84 internal links and reduced it to 5 (for exact match keywords) and his ranking improved.
• Gross over content is much easier with AI, but it can result in keyword stuffing. Google is better now at picking out what sounds more natural.
• For local SEO and maps, something like “keyword + city” and “keyword + city2” is still ok. It isn’t great for blogs or long-term organic SEO.
• The gap between the “rich and poor” has become more apparent. Visibility for struggling sites dropped more drastically, while highly ranking sites improved.

Q: What about new sites? Since new businesses will be starting from the bottom.

It is possible, but when you make a GBP, Google gives it an initial mini boost. If you get reviews right away and are consistent, you keep that boost.