Ginny Marvin is the Ads Liaison at Google. Several people, myself included, have pointed out the Local Search Ads (LSA) spam to Ginny. Ginny ignores us and refuses to tweet back to anybody. LSA, aka Google Guarantee profiles, have to go through a rigorous vetting process. All employees have to pass a background check. The business needs to have licenses and insurance. If a consumer has a bad experience, Google will refund up to $2500. There shouldn’t be any way for fake profiles to be created, but spammers are having a field day.
One of the issues with Google is that all product teams are siloed. The Google Business Profile (GBP) and Paid Ads teams don’t speak. LSA is a hybrid product between PPC and GBP. You can connect your GBP to your LSA account. There is no way to report a fake or fraudulent LSA profile like we can with GBP. Zero action is taken even when a fake profile is reported to the LSA team. The spam and abuse are hurting legitimate businesses.
The first LSA abuse I saw was with personal injury lawyers. Google allowed various law firms to create and verify LSAs using PO boxes. Po Boxes are not permitted for GBP, even though some get verified, and Google doesn’t always take them down. The lawyer in question created 22 LSAs with one lawyer’s state bar license and nine LSAs with their license. The fake GBPs and LSAs were verified. The websites created fake or used other lawyers and bypassed the LSA checks. I don’t even think LSA performed the background checks. The list was shared with me back in June 2022. Here is the one LSA that is still live.
LSA spam branched out to garage door repair. Google allowed LSAs to rank from San Diego to San Francisco. Spammers went crazy creating multiple spam LSAs and filling them with fake verified reviews. Some of these “verified reviews” use fake names and gibberish. Google holds all LSA reviews for two days before publishing them. The spammers are fooling Google.
The spammers are now stealing GBPs and merging the profiles with their LSA. They are stealing the GBPs for parks and bakeries. I pointed this out to Danny Sullivan at Brighton SEO. He advised me to contact Ginny Marvin, but she ignored us. She has been useless, and LSA spam has moved to other categories. I can spot the spam with my eyes, yet employees at Google or the third-party vendor can’t? Tell me how this works. The LSA project is a failure, and Google has failed to protect consumers and legitimate businesses. The only way to fix this broken system is to allow us to use Suggest an Edit, a redressal form, and a help forum to report the abuse. Google needs a real team to handle the spam investigations. The spam team is as useless as Ginny Marvin. Welcome to FAFO, Ginny. To use one of my favorite Robert Deniro lines, “I gave you a chance to be a hero, and you blew it.”
