A Major Win
You may not have noticed, but there was a very big win for the skydiving industry this past Friday. More than 100 Google Business Pages were removed by Google in the matter of 24 hours.
The skydiving industry’s favorite third party middleman based in Kennessaw, Georgia went to some
marvelous lengths to set up an incredible network of Google Business pages in every major US marketplace utilizing the top searched keywords. Examples of these pages were:
skydiving.com/newyorkcity
skydiving.com / newark
skydiving.com charlotte
skydiving.com / boston
skydiving.com / seattle
skydiving.com / philadelphia
skydiving.com / detroit
skydiving.com / columbus
skydiving.com / san francisco
Many of these pages were connected to physical addresses associated with mailbox / packaging stores in various cities. The majority of these pages had fake reviews written by many employees (and one of the owners) of this third party operator.
What Went Down?
Push someone far enough and they’ll take action! There’s a dogged DZO out there tired of losing business to third-party operators going to great lengths to take away his business; so, he took it up with Google. Google has Google+ Communities where business owners can ask questions. Essentially, it’s a support forum which allows people to ask questions with people associated with Google. Fortunately, the right forum host was interested by the DZO’s story and ran it up the chain. Voila – just like that a problem that has been ongoing in every marketplace was eliminated.
For clarity, these websites can still be found in the SERP’s (search engine results page), but not a featured Google Business page which draws in a lot of traffic and serves as the top of the funnel to get calls and inquiries into the call center. It’s the reason why there was a GMB page in every major US market.
A tip of the cap to this DZO who’s done a great service to the US skydiving industry!
An Interesting Lawsuit Filed in Cobb County, Georgia
While I don’t have too much information on this case, there does appear to be a lawsuit filed by the State of Georgia against Marvelay, LLC dba Rushcube and Spot Reservations. Everyone in the skydiving industry will find this to be an interesting read. Click here to read the case filed in the Superior Court of Cobb County.
How To Do This
If a Google Business Page or review is truly false and violates Google’s policies then with persistence you should be able to have the review or page removed by using the Support Forum to get additional help (as was used by our hero DZO).
Within the forum, you can get some advice.
i). Visit the Spam & Policy Forum in GMB
ii). View previous responses to questions like yours or you can start a new thread asking for help.
iii). Ask a community expert. These experts are usually quite helpful and may be able to get you some help from the Small Business Support Team.
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WOW! This is a long time coming. I am in the muck of this right now. So happy to hear one of these posers took a hit. The more I market and research my biggest marketing competition are these “fake” third party sales sites, plus a few very big third party sales sites that sell a variety of “adrenaline” based activities, globally. I’m also finding there is a huge amount of people that have no clue about how the internet works, where they are, what search service they are using, what website they are on, or how they got to the info, nothing. Totally clueless, gullible,
I also sense a type of “artificial” price point. Doesn’t matter how low a DZ goes on their price, these guys are marketing up 2,3,4x and selling them all day long. As they are going for traffic. Something the regular DZ business owner doesn’t have time to study or build out for.
Until the DZ’s rally together, educate theme selves, take marketing seriously (as invest in), and make their marketing their own, nothing is going to change. Plus, a real marketing strategy will bring your community together and further strengthen your/our business model. The petty competition attitude between DZ’s is so last century. Stand in the true value skydiving has to offer the world. Period.
There is no excuse. We are by nature content creators. Together we could rule and wipe out these bottom feeders simply by standing up and owning it.
Best wishes on the DZ Marketing Conference. It’s needed. You are needed. The path to truly digging up the gold, increasing sales, prosperity for all of us in the industry, is unity.
Send it Barrie!