Hey! Sorry we missed you last week. Things get crazy around here when Google steps on a rake.
If you’re not in the know, Google culled millions of reviews on Thursday of last week. These were primarily genuine, five star, not-even-debatably-fake reviews. We’re hoping that many of you didn’t need to deal with attentive clients in a panic (“attentive” being the most polite word we can think of).
It’s always fun waking up to turbulence when you’ve been at cruising altitude for some time.
This bug played out in two ways. Some reviews vanished. Other Business Profiles would have, say, 100 reviews if you scrolled through and tallied them, but the count would show a smaller number, like 86 or 90.
Google claimed that the issue was fully resolved by the beginning of this work week. We saw evidence to the contrary. The good news is that an update from someone from Google states that most affected GBPs are back to normal as of yesterday. We haven’t done a comprehensive analysis or anything, but, anecdotally, this looks accurate to us.
This is probably a good time to remind you we save all deleted reviews for our subscribers. Click into any business from the Local Viking or Local Brand Manager locations page, then click the reviews link in the column on the left. You’ll see every live and deleted review for locations you’ve synched into our platforms. Nifty, right?
You guys know we’re tied in with WEB20 Ranker, right? If you have no idea what that means, WEB20 is a white label digital marketing agency. You can sign a client, turn over all of the SEO work to WEB20, and charge your new client a higher rate than you pay for the services you sign them up for. It’s hard to find a service that WEB20 doesn’t offer. Even annoying stuff like citations and backlinks. If you’re doing things the hard way, you should know that many of your competitors are following this exact playbook.
We’re bringing WEB20 up because coupon code LOVE will get you 15% off anything for sale on web20ranker.com between now and Monday. You can read the details here. Happy Valentine’s Day.
Before we get into today’s closing links, you should all be aware of the fact that Google Business Profiles now allow for WhatsApp messaging in the United States. Although almost no one in the U.S. uses WhatsApp, it’s wildly popular worldwide. If you or your clients have a business that caters to tourists in any way, it’s worth implementing. You can read Google’s documentation to get that set up.
It doesn’t often do us much good, but the Google Maps blog is the first page we always check for newsletter content. We saw this Gulf of America post and want to direct your attention toward a Johnny Harris short from Tuesday about the name of that body of water changing at different Google Maps zoom levels. In terms of useful links, you can take a look at Hootesuite’s 36 strategies for boosting Instagram Story engagement. In terrifying news, there’s plenty of evidence that suggests the omnipresence of spell checking software has negatively impacted young people’s ability to spell words correctly, in the same way that turn-by-turn directions have degraded society’s ability to navigate with maps. An article from 404 Media titled Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared” spells out what that means for a civilization with ChatGPT access. On a lighter note, you should check out this Buffer post about finding songs that are trending on TikTok while they’re still popular.
Have a great weekend, everyone, and don’t worry about that Microsoft study too much– Idiocracy was hilarious.