AI Ranking Factors, SAB Pin Hack & Google Review Problems | E41 The Whitespark Local Update

0:00Welcome to another episode of the WhiteSpark Local Update podcast with me, Darren Shaw. I'm back from vacation and have a very special guest with me today. It is Amy Toman. Welcome, Amy. Thank you, Darren. And we sounds like we both were traveling. You you a bit more. You were off doing lovely things in

0:20where? Europe? France, yeah. Went to France for 3 weeks. That's Claire has been filling in on the podcast for the past 3 weeks while me and the fam traveled around the south of France and Paris. And uh yeah, it's an amazing trip. I know I heard it's Claire make some comments about how you were out you were

0:35out biking and baguettes. I wasn't [laughter] doing any of that. And then there was some comment about like having onions around my neck. I don't know is that like a French thing? I don't even know what she's I don't know what she's talking about, yeah. I'm sure she spends time over there, so it was, you know, it's relevant to that. I was actually last week in Mexico City for the Google the yearly Google PE Summit. And that was really cool because it was regional, but it was for all of the Americas. Sometimes they they don't include people in South America, but this time it was everybody from Canada

1:06down to I don't know what the lowest depth Argentina, Brazil. And and that was really that was really cool. That was really it was a good time. We learned a lot. We did a lot of networking and you know, just kind of appreciating appreciation by Google and us appreciating each other working together throughout the years. Yeah, so if you don't know Amy Toman, let me tell you a little something about Amy Toman. She is a diamond Google Business Profile Product Expert. One of the few diamonds. There's only I don't know like 10 maybe max in the Google Business Profile forum. But to me, she is the

1:44diamond that shines the brightest. She works very hard in the forum. She's such a great mentor. She really invests a lot into that forum and she's one of the the strongest voices and the biggest helper on the forum. So, um, it's great to have her on the podcast cuz she's going to bring uh amazing perspectives and really interesting topics that you maybe not

2:06might not hear otherwise. And I will say too, Darren, we've known each other for a while. Like we were trying to figure it out uh when Joy was there. We were trying to figure out when we all met, which was in Local U in um Santa Monica. We were trying to remember if that was 2018 or 2017. And that was that was when I met you and uh Yeah, just confirmed everything I always thought about you about how wonderful

2:27you are. So. Aw, thanks. Yeah. Well, it confirmed to me that you are also wonderful. [laughter] All right, let's talk about some links. Let's talk about what's been happening in local search. Uh I will I will start the first one. This could be big, everybody. Listen up. So, Mika La Lapisto on LinkedIn has a post that he posted and it's basically talking about how you could move the map pin

2:55for a service area business. What? That's uh pretty crazy because this has always been a big problem. You can't move service area business map pin. You get a lot of you got a service area businesses where if you check on a ranking grid, you can see that they're ranking totally not where they're supposed to do. But maybe if you can move a pin, you can fix it. So, anyways, uh the way it works is you go to the listing on maps and you add this little code. You'll have to look it up in the show notes after, but it's like exclamation 10m to ex it's just like a

3:26chunk of code. You add that into the URL after data equals and then you press enter and you're going to get this new little panel that I've never seen before that gives you these options. You're going to it's got wrong pin location or address, missing place, add or fix a road, also interesting, wrong information, or your opinions about maps. You can tell them what you think. So, uh it's got those options and then if If do it on an SAB listing, you can actually drag the pin. So, I noticed that it wouldn't work if I am doing it if I go directly to a listing on Maps, I

3:59have to be kind of in the search results and then just click a listing and then I I put that in there and it comes up. But, it's a suggesting edit like any other suggesting edit, so it may or may not get approved by Google when you submit it. But, I do find that if if you're really high-level local guide,

4:15you can often get your edits approved. And the huge question for me is could you use this to fix an SAB that is that currently has their pin in the wrong place. Common problem. Right now, the only fix for that is you got to create a brand new Google Business Profile, then you got to move your reviews from that one over to over to the new one, and then okay, finally now you're an SAB ranking in the right place. But, maybe you could use this little hack to actually move the pin and then you don't

4:43have to go through all that trouble. Very interesting. What do you think of that, Amy? I worry. I worry like I worry everything. Um, because what was it? It was it I think it was a couple years ago where we had the pins were moved too easily. That is a concern, for sure. This like I don't almost don't want to talk about it cuz I don't want the hackers to be like

5:03messing around. Um, I think this is really cool. I think this is great as long as Google is then kind of backing the information up, you know, what what's been requested, what's been suggested. As long as they they go in and they kind of verify that information, even going so far as to possibly request re-verification on that. Because I have had a lot of trouble uh, with getting clarification

5:29as to how to actually move an SAB. So, I mean, if this exploit works, great, but it's hard to get Google to say this is the direct path. So, until until I can get further info to, you know, definitely say this is how you move an SAB, you know, I'm open to anything. If it if it works, if it doesn't violate the you know, the terms of service and just generally if it works, this is

5:54great. It is a concern that there may be a positive side while oh, we can finally fix the problem for SABs, but the the dark side is the hackers and schemers might be messing with other profiles. So, you got to keep an eye on it. And I don't I'm not here to plug my software, but you should probably have something that monitors your listings and lets you know when stuff happens. And the WhiteSpark local platform, it's only a dollar a month and it it allow you to like if

6:20someone moves your map pin, you'll know. So, Let me point out my friend Darren that when they started doing that we I was working with your software. And I remember specifically saying, do you have a function to move this to monitor this? And I believe within a day, maybe even 12 hours Oh, yeah, we built it for you. You did. And I remember saying, this is amazing. And I went on and I talked about it because the whole idea that somebody can tell me that before a client contacts us and says, you know, hey, there's a problem. I I just Your software is really, really good for

6:55that. If anybody doesn't use it, a dollar a year, please, you know, just hook it up to every client you have. You get all these notifications. It's excellent. It's basically free. You should just do it. Yeah. [laughter] All right, what do you got? What do you got to share with us? Well, I found kind of an interesting one. A business received an email that said, we reviewed your business profile and confirmed that it violates our policy on fake engagement. As a result,

7:21your profile will be restricted. Okay. What's the difference between restricted and suspended? Is there a difference? Restricted means it stays online, but you cannot you cannot you will not receive any reviews. People will be told that they cannot enter a review. Or I guess if any if any somehow get by, they will be published.

7:40Okay. And you can't uh, you can't update any content, you can't add photos, you can't add, you know, services, you can't reply to anything. That's restricted. Um, suspended is where, uh, you basically do the same thing, except it's not seen. Yeah, [laughter] now you're not on the map at all. This In this case, they're not taking it offline, which I have seen them do sometimes. They They will say, "Oh, you know, fake engagement, let's go." This one, it's pretty cool. They're just telling you they're putting a block on there. They're telling you the account's restricted. And what's really cool is that they say, "Here's a quick reminder

8:15of some important business profile policies." In other words, we're assuming that you didn't mean to do this, but you did. [laughter] And so, they have, you know, three different points about accepting all reviews, don't pay for reviews, and don't solicit positive reviews from employees. I have a bunch of questions about this. Um, might be brought up. Uh, they don't say how long that lasts. My guess is based on prior experience that it's going to last 30 to 30 to 60 days, that block. I also I'm curious as to whether the three points, again, I posted this on LinkedIn, the three points that they bring up, don't pay for

8:52reviews, accept all reviews, and don't solicit positive reviews from, you know, people related to you. I'm wondering if those [clears throat] are specific to what Google found. Well, sounds like it, right? It's like fake engagement, that sounds like we've detected that your reviews look suspiciously fake. And then, especially with those three being the policy things that they highlight. So, like, "Hey, we noticed your reviews look suspicious, and we've restricted your profile, and stop effing around." That's basically what that

9:19email says. That's really what it is. And I think, you know, I mean, it's a polite reminder. I also think it's it's reasonable the way they phrase it, you know? They're not like, you know, you're a horrible business, whatever. It's just like, this is what we noticed, this is what we've done, we're We're to give you some reminders, and that was the end of it. I don't know if there was also any way to appeal that, and as I've said to people who asked, and we can we can talk about about different types of blocks, but I also don't think that these are going to the

9:48time that it would take to go through the process of appealing this. I think by the time you get a response to that, it the the block would have worn off anyway. Good job, Google. Really, like the the fake review thing is such a massive problem. It's awful. Businesses are manipulating reviews, and so I like to

10:07see them do something about it. Yep. All right. My next thing to chat about is a massive, literally massive, correlation studies of LLM ranking factors. So, this guy, Ben Wills, he did the study. It's 10 different models across five providers. The providers being like Google, Open AI, Anthropic, Perplexity. The whole data is like three petabytes of data. He analyzed 100 industries, 403,000 different prompts were run, and then he was trying to correlate, you know, visibility with some of these signals. And so, it's great. It's like, you know, it's like a ranking signals report. And really in-depth, massive stuff. And so, I'm going to spill the beans and give you the number one thing

10:56across all industries was just being in the search results. If you are ranking in Google search results, that's the thing that's going to, you know, correlate best with visibility in the large language models. Second one is homepage keyword relevance. So, we're talking about SEO. Both of those are SEO. SEO's not dead, you people. [laughter]

11:16The third one is domain page rank. Again, we're talking about SEO. And so, page rank, domain page rank, I I don't know what that data point is. Where did you get that from? This one is big. Wikidata. So, presence in Wikidata has a strong correlation with visibility in the large language models. Wikipedia, of course, yeah, that's a

11:37huge one. But one of the things I love about this is that he also does quite a few local search industry. He does cosmetic dentistry, he does legal services for businesses, auto glass repair, a whole bunch of others. So you can actually dig into these those specific industries and see you can actually see differences. Like different industries will have different correlations. So if you are a SAS business, then Reddit might be more important than if you are a cosmetic dentist, for example. So it's really

12:04cool to be able to dig into that. Of course, I got to say correlation is not causation. It's a correlation study. But yeah, so if you look at the legal one, the number one strongest signal for visibility in in AI was Wikidata. What? Wikidata? Wikidata is so interesting to me. Anyone that's been doing SEO for a while has maybe tried to do a Wikipedia and they gave up because you can't get your business your especially like a local business, forget it. Unless you are a noteworthy brand, you're not going to get a Wikipedia page. Wikidata, on the other hand, is being referenced by all the large language models and it is much

12:43more plausible to get into it. You can't add yourself. I've started investigating this. You can't just go and add your own. You got to get an editor to add you, but it's much more reasonable to get into Wikidata. So that's big. Anyways, what do you got to do? You want to get, according to this data, get listed on Wikidata, earn links from pages that are already ranking for your practice area terms. Get a Wikipedia if you can or at least get cited, build a real Reddit presence, publish your name on JD Supra, Lexology, and local business journals. So this like for the legal one. Keep your entity

13:16consistent everywhere. So I think actually this is a big thing and I'll talk about this in my next link. Citation consistency becoming more and more important. Do some link building, show up in search results. Anyways, that's how you can do it. And then you'll rank number one in all AI chats. What's your next thing to talk about? I just I This is just something I saw last week. I'm sorry to push mine, but I I've been dealing with a lot of like review issues recently. And this was sent to me by a gentleman who somebody he knew entered a review and got a got an email back saying that the review

13:49violated policies. Oh, is that new? They're not They don't normally send those. They do not. And not only that, they said our automated remove the content because it seems that the content may not follow our maps content policies. In this case, the specific This is very cool because I've seen the review and I don't know how this applied, but in this case the specific policy involved is misrepresentation. And then they link to the policy and then they say you can appeal. I do know that they submitted an appeal. It didn't go down well. They went They went in and they re-edited it and it was posted. But Google does not

14:21usually do this. They just don't post it. And this is This is kind of It seems to be some kind of new step towards transparency. So it's all you know, it seems like it's it's just starting to roll out. And I think it's very cool because reviews are so problematic recently between reviews not showing on a large scale because of a bug and people just you know, losing them overnight not because of a bug, but because Google is is applying filter

14:48after filter after filter. Mhm. Mhm. So for somebody to enter what they consider a reasonable review and to be told that and just instead of just it not showing, now they're actually being told which policy they violated, that's really cool. I mean, again, good job Google. I think it's really really a good, you know, good thing on Google to be more

15:08transparent. a black box for decades. [laughter] Now we're finally getting to see at least Like that's the thing, right? Okay, your listing got suspended? Tell me why. Oh, my review got deleted? Why did it get deleted? Oh, it's this policy. Great. Oh, yeah, I see what I said there and you can edit it and

15:25change and fix it. You know what I want to point out though cuz a lot of people think that too, that they think that if Google's not showing your review that it's been deleted. If Google is not like all of a sudden overnight I lost 100 reviews. Google deleted them. You have to remember that Google doesn't delete them. They hide them. And that's because they hide them, that's why you will hear people say, "Well, I disputed it or I contacted support or went on the forum and they brought them back." It's not that they brought them back so much as they like unclicked that button to say

15:57instead of it's unpublished, it's now published. So, your reviews are there. It's just a question of will Google publish them? And if they don't publish them, if you can dispute that that decision. Um okay, you just gave a link so my final one is from the great minds at Near Media. Near Media had Cyrus Shepard on his on their podcast. So, Mike Blumenthal, Greg Sterling had a nice chat with Cyrus Shepard. And Cyrus is man, that guy he's on fire lately. He's producing so much great content and research and um he's really doing lots of stuff. So, they wanted to talk to him about what local brand actually means to Google and

16:34I. So, this whole episode is about talking about how do you become a local brand? Uh Cyrus gives um four pillars. Distinctiveness, can Google tell you apart from a generic query? Relevance, what are you known for? Reputation, what does third party says? And demand, how many people go looking for you specifically? That's kind of like branded search, right? So, he puts it in

16:56those four pillars. Uh one of the things I liked from the episode is he talks about NAP consistency, citation consistency, having a second life. Uh AI systems need the same entity disambiguation that traditional local search used to need, but a lot of people kind of let citation consistency lapse um assuming Google got smart enough to infer it. In a new AI world, I think you got to hold the robot's hand a little bit more and and you do need to worry a

17:24little bit about safety and consistency. Uh, well, worked out well for us cuz the citation business at Whitespark has never been better. Anyways, I and I just wanted to close with like if you like this podcast, you really should also be listening to the Near Media Podcast. It is what it is 100% the greatest podcast in local

17:45search and uh, you must listen to it. Anyways, uh, what's your last link? My last link, I'm kind of cheating. It's something I have not uh, I have not written out yet and I really need to do. Um, because I am seeing over the past about 6 months Yeah. blocks being placed on Google listings. And there's two types of blocks. The one that everybody knows about is a review block. And we talked about this a little bit before. I kind of define these two

18:10as punitive and preventative. Punitive is the one that most people see, which is we see that you have been doing this, incentivizing, paying for reviews, whatever. We see this activity and we're going to place a block on your listing and you can't Basically, we're doing everything short of suspending you. You still have the visibility, but you can't touch it, you

18:32can't update it, you can't add anything. You can't get new reviews either, right? No reviews, no. And even if like I said, even if somehow somebody managed to get a review or to to input a review, it will not be shown. Um, Google has is starting to tell people about those, but that's a new thing. For months, they've been really amping these up and they have not been telling people. All of a sudden, people come to the forum and they're like or to support, like why is this happening? And then they find out. They usually last from 30, I think the minimum is 30. It may even be 60 days and I have not seen

19:05anyone get it lifted by contacting support or by appealing. I'm not saying you shouldn't try, but I'm just telling you in my experience they have not come off. The other type of block is a preventative block. These may surprise people that Google does this. This happens when a listing gets review attacked. Um it could be um one person coming in had a bad experience and all of a sudden they just lose it and they they and their family and and they go on social media and you know and they get that. Uh it could be any number of things, but basically what happens is you are getting attacked non-stop. I

19:45have seen a business go from I think it was like I don't know 4.2 to I it was lower than two. It was like 1.4 or something. Wow. Just getting hammered. Google is a lot more aware with all their new efforts this year, I guess with AI, I'm not sure. They're a lot more aware of this activity, so they're

20:03a much more inclined to place the block. But what sometimes happens is it goes away like melts slowly cuz they you know the block all of a sudden you're getting a bad reviews again. If these are consistent over time that you're getting these what you perceive to be bad reviews, fake reviews, contact Google. They may already place a block, but if they don't, you contact Google customer service. You show them the reviews that are coming in or you reference them. Let them know you don't know where these are coming from and or you tell them I do know where it's coming from and here's the source. If

20:35it's social media, you link to it. You tell them. If they don't apply the uh the block, then you go to the forum. You explain it. Don't mention your business's name or location, but explain it. Say look, I've already talked to support. They weren't helpful. Go on there. But punitive and protective are the two types of blocks that we see most

20:52recently. Yeah, I've seen this happen in like political situations, right? So someone they they take a political stance in their business and it appeals to the people that align with their politics, but it definitely [laughter] does not appeal to uh other percentage of the population, and then they just like someone says something, an influencer says something, and then a million negative reviews go on the

21:15profile. And but it cuz it almost makes you wonder, are they putting the block on because they just can't keep all the the real fake ones out? Or, you know, if they strengthen them to keep all those out, will they even need to put a block on? All sorts of things to consider that uh nobody has time for, but anyway, I think Google in terms of the preventative I think they're doing an excellent job. They they are helping the business, and they're trying to protect their you know, all that information that's contained in the reviews from

21:43being used publicly. Yeah. That wraps it up. We did it. We did a whole podcast. It was a pleasure to chat with you, Amy. Uh for all of our listeners, please subscribe on YouTube and leave us a a review and a comment on wherever you get your podcasts. Uh we're now actually publishing video podcasts to both Apple and Spotify, so you can watch the video on three different places, which is nice. Sometimes it's nice to watch the video cuz our excellent editor, Kevin, shout out to Kevin. He uh he always uh adds fun little details. So, if you're listening and not watching, you might want to watch it sometimes. Um and

22:14I just quickly should tell everybody that we launched the new analyze tab in the Whitespark local ranking grids, and [snorts] it is nuts. If you haven't tried that tool in a while, go check it out and look at the analyze tab. It's amazing. So much competitive data is pulled in there because we're the only uh grid tracker that tracks to 100, so for every single point we're tracking 100 competitors, and then you get this massive load of data, and we figured out a great way to present that. So, just go

22:37check it out. Thank you, Amy. Thank you. We did a great job. It was it was lovely to be here. We did a great job. High five. Good job, us. Okay. [laughter] Bye, everybody.