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Google My Business: Irrelevant Photos

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Andrew.K

Andrew.K

Green Pea
Oct 25, 2017
3
1
First Name
Andrew
#1
Has anyone had luck choosing photos to display on SERPs for their Google My Business profile pages? Recently, Google has been overriding our photo choices and they've picked some terrible, user-submitted photos to show on SERPs. Our clients are understandably upset but when I call Google they say they can remove individual photos, which isn't too scalable.

We've also tried flagging photos which works only a small % of the time.

Any suggestions or best practices would be appreciated!

Here's an example of one we have showing on SERPs for a dealer:
Screen-Shot-2017-10-25-at-2.16.52-PM.png
 
#2
That used to be controlled via Google+ profile (business), I do believe. Maybe that has changed, I haven't dabbled in that for a while and Google changes things on the fly, with zero warning. However, you used to be able to define which was which, like you see below.

https://support.google.com/business/answer/6103862?hl=en

Types of photos
There are several types of photos you should add to your business listing:
  • Profile photo - Add a profile photo to help your customers recognize your business on Google. Your profile photo will be featured next to your business name on your Google+ page. It should be a different photo from your business logo, which should be added in the "Logo" section.
  • Logo - Add your logo to help customers identify your business. Square-sized logos display best on Google.
  • Cover photo - Add a cover photo to showcase your page’s personality. Your cover photo is the large photo featured at the top of your Google+ page. Note that this photo will be cropped to fit a 16:9 aspect ratio.
  • Additional photos - Add different kinds of photos to spotlight features of your business that customers consider when making purchasing decisions. You can add different kinds of photos depending on the kind of business you manage.
Forum posts might help you:
  1. https://www.en.advertisercommunity....ate-photo-of-my-business-location/m-p/578068#
  2. https://www.en.advertisercommunity....-Business-Cover-Photo-Blank/m-p/1167767#M7403
BTW, I wasn't under the impression Google provides support for this. They provide support for a very limited amount of products, mostly PPC / AdWords options.
 
#3
Hey Alexander,

I think they've changed their policies recently because we used to have success uploading profile, logo, and cover photos. Now Google is overriding our choices for photos.

When I spoke with a Google rep yesterday, they said that any photos we upload might be chosen as the first photo to display on Google SERPs so we should only upload quality relevant photos...makes sense. What doesn't make sense is they have regularly been choosing user-submitted photos to display which we have no control over. So far for our clients, they've picked a toilet, a construction site, and multiple photos of chairs. Not sure what they're onto there!

Any idea how we could get around that?

Also, if you need to contact Google My Business, here's a handy link :)
 
#4
Interesting and I thought something fishy was going on, as I saw my dad's business show the wrong logo and other pictures in his Google Business Listing. Those images were defined under their old system correctly.

I don't really get what they are doing, but knowing them, they probably could give a crap. If they are doing what you claim, then this is bonkers and makes no sense to me and I've no idea how to get around it. I used to manage social accounts for many dealers and that included Google+ (when authorship still mattered, seems to have died). I don't miss those days, to be frank for reasons just like this. *sigh

Meh...!
 
#5
Hey @Andrew.K

This probably won't be helpful at all, but your post reminded me of one I wrote way back in 2011. Hopefully this will at least help you not to fret too much until it gets reworked. It was WAY worse when consumers had the ability to upload images, especially if they'd had a "not so great" experience.

https://forum.dealerrefresh.com/threads/you-guys-are-the-sh-t.1890/
 
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