This New Local SEO Scam is Crazy

The scammers have outdone themselves with this new tactic:

Moving your map pin.

Keep reading or watch this video to find out how to avoid losing your rankings because of this 👇️

How does this scam work?

Competitors will go to your Google Business Profile and drag your pin 100 miles away from where you’re located:

Why is this such a big deal?

Your local rankings are explicitly tied to the location of your map pin. Therefore, if someone moves your pin far away from your location, your rankings will move with it.

You’ll stop ranking around your actual location, and you’ll start ranking around that desolate lake your pin was moved to:

How are they doing this?

Unfortunately, anyone can move your map pin. They just have to go to your Profile, click “Suggest an edit”, and move your pin on the map.

Google is happy to accept most Profile edits from the general public 🤷

But it gets worse

Even if you figure out that your pin has been moved (which not many people do), if you go to your Profile and move the pin back, Google might suspend your Google Business Profile 😃

What’s the solution?

There are three steps you need to take:

1. Be aware of this scam.

If you are reading this email, you’re good.

2. Recognize when/if your pin gets moved.

What makes this scam so sneaky is that Google will not alert you if your map pin gets moved.

You might go weeks or months without knowing why your rankings fell off a cliff. And by the time you figure it out, you may have lost thousands of dollars because you no longer rank in your area.

To help solve this, we have added a new feature to our Local Platform that will alert you to any changes to your map pin.

You’ll get an email like this 👇️

And then you can go to the platform to see more details about the update 👇️

• If the pin appears to be in the right location, just dismiss the notification.

• If the pin is not in the right place, you should fix it right away to restore your rankings (see below).

3. Move your pin back in a way that does not get you suspended.

Unfortunately, Google’s API does not currently allow us to adjust the map pin through our software.

But don’t worry! We will provide you with detailed instructions on how to fix your map pin manually without getting suspended (the trick is to use “Suggest an edit” instead of editing in Google’s interface).

This is just one of the many awesome features of our Local Platform, and it only costs $1/mo (yeah, you read that right).

So, sign up now and tell these scammers to scram:

Hope this helps!

Darren