Recently various SEOs have claimed their Google My Business listings suspended as soon as they added short names to their respective profiles.
But what are short names? Well, it was introduced in April this year with the purpose of allowing businesses to create custom URLs for their My Business listings. But, recently various cases were reported where adding short names to their profiles has become dangerous for various businesses having an online presence.
It is costing them a lot, as many legitimate business listings got suspended as well as removed from SERPs. A very important point to note here is that not all businesses are getting suspended for adding short names. It is observed that there is a series of random suspensions. Thus, one cannot really point out the rules or basis for random suspensions which are taking at this speed.
Due to this sudden process, various business and SEO giants took the help of social media to spread awareness about this issue. Eg- Joe Young blood twitted several tweets addressing this problem. He tried to explain the possible reason for this issue, which according to him is an apparent bug.
Another important point to note here is that various businesses and their owners should stay calm in this situation, as most of the business listings aren’t really experiencing any issues. The ratio is 1:5 and the number of complaints received are not much. At the same time, one should keep in mind that short names are a recurring theme among a string of recent suspensions. In recent times, if you have considered a short name for your Google My Business listings, you might end up being on watch for a new bug, which is leading to the suspension. The issues are expected to spread further. So, it is recommended for various agencies to be alarmed and alert.
Even after such random chaos created due to this suspension thing, Google is yet to make any official announcement. Many people have also claimed that they were able to get their listings re-instated successfully by notifying the respected search engine.
Keeping all the factors in mind, you actually might consider going with the flow or present scenario. This means you might consider holding off on adding a short name to any of your Google My Business listings. This is recommended until there is no permanent solution found to this bug and until it is fixed. In case you already have a listing with a short name, it would be good to check whether it is suspended or still properly showing in search results.
As far as the problem of those businesses is concerned, whose Google My Business listings have been suspended, they can try to find posts and articles about it on the Google support forum as well as other certified websites. Or you may also opt for a direct solution that simply removes the short name which has added.
Experts claim that the best course of action under this situation is the removal of short names by concerned business, so you might consider following it.
