Spammers always find new way to spam and their latest stomping ground are the free websites provided by Google My Business for businesses without a website.

The only problem is that Google My Business cannot remove these spam websites and are asking users to report these websites to Google – wait what?

 

Google My Business Spam Websites

In June 2017 Google My Business launched their single page mobile friendly websites for small businesses directly created and integrate with a Google My Business Page.

 

 

I am not going to list some of these site, you can do a site: search query yourself.

 

 
Notice how payday loans are also still hanging about even after 2017 payday loan algo and its 2019 payday loan algo update by Google.
 

Why Cant Google Remove Them?

At the time of publishing this, these sites cannot be removed by Google My Business (I do hope they figure out how to soon).

When a user creates a Google My Business listing they are able to create and publish a free Google website, this is attached to a unique CID created for the GMB listing.

When the listing is removed for being spam / fake or merged, the CID is expunged however this does not remove the created website. Because the CID is expunged they cannot access to hit the “unpublish” button and 404 the site.

Instead Google My Business Support is asking the user who is reporting this spam site to report the website to Google via:

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/remove-information

Another issue is that when you click through to remove a Google Product they don’t offer GMB. So at the moment I would suggest selecting – Google Sites (Google’s wiki- and web page-creation tool).

 

The Merry Go Round

This quirk in the Google My Business system has been discovered by spammers now (I wont explain how to create the spam listings for obvious reasons) and being taken full advantage of.

• Free to create
• Hosted by Google

And impossible to remove, or rather reliant on a user that comes across this, to take the time and file a report with Google. I still have no idea if anyone has seen a business site being removed after reporting – would love to hear.

I have currently filed a request, time will tell if the business site gets removed and if so, the time frame.

 
Online Ownership offers a Google My Business Consultation to businesses finding it difficult to navigate the product and the quirks involved when things go terribly wrong and a disgruntled employee creates a spam website about your business.