SEO 101 Ep 532: Listicles Backfiring, the Dangers of Domain Changes, and Unfair Review Removal

Summary

SEO 101 Ep 532 — Listicles Backfiring, the Dangers of Domain Changes, and Unfair Review Removal

Podcast: SEO 101
Hosts: Ross Dunn, Scott Van Achte
Date: June 24, 2026
Network: WMR.FM

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Episode Overview

This episode of SEO 101 delves into the latest SEO and search marketing developments, highlighting three main themes:

• How Google AI Overviews are backfiring on self-serving listicles
• The SEO and practical risks involved in changing your domain
• Managing and mitigating damage from unfair or fake business reviews

Ross Dunn and Scott Van Achte guide listeners through current news, strategic insights, and hands-on tips, using their signature approachable, sometimes cheeky style.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Google Ads Destination Mismatch Policy Update

[02:04]

• What changed?
  • Google will now allow cross-domain redirects for ads in select cases, especially for brands who want to send users from their ad to a third-party retailer's site. Approval from Google is required.
• Implications:
  • Big change after 20+ years of strict policies. Likely benefits major brands most.
• Process details TBD:
  • Unclear how advertisers request approval—could be via ads interface, form, or Google rep.
• Scott’s take:

  “Only the big players will be doing this sort of thing. But we’ll see.” (03:30, Scott)

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2. SEO News: Google Spam Update – June 2026

[03:47]

• Second spam update of 2026.
  • Uses “SpamBrain,” AI tools to detect new/existing spam types.
• Impact:
  • Sites breaking spam rules may see big ranking losses or be deindexed.
  • Recovery is slow—even with compliance, it can take months.
• On link spam:
  • Removing bad links doesn’t restore lost rankings (“the benefit those links gave is permanently removed”).
• Ross’s advice:

  “If you’ve seen a big drop and just can’t figure out what’s going on, let us know. This is right up our alley.” (05:21, Ross)

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3. Search Console and Bing Updates: Still No Click Data

Google Search Console AI Reports
[06:06]

• More users see AI performance data (impressions, pages, devices, etc.) but still no click data.
• Hosts’ frustration:

  “That’s the metric we want the most!” (07:35, Scott)
  “I think it’s because they realize no one’s clicking.” (07:16, Ross)

Bing Webmaster Tools
[08:19]

• Enhanced AI Performance Reports now feature:
  • Intents (query classification)
  • Topics (thematic clusters)
  • Citation Share (site’s share in citations for a query)
  • Compare (data overlays for period comparisons)
• Still no click data.

“Where’s my click data? … We’ll never get click data, man.” (09:52, Scott)

Country Reporting in Bing
[10:20]

• Will expand from 10 countries to all global regions.
• Useful for clients targeting international markets.

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4. Google AI Overviews Backfire on Listicles

[13:09]

• Study by Lily Ray:

  • Analyzed 100 B2B “best X software” queries with AI Overviews.
  • Of 80 queries with AI results, self-promotional listicles cited 323 times.
  • In 69% of those (224 times), Google cited the listicle but promoted its competitors (not the author/site itself).

• Example:

  • For “best LMS for selling courses,” Google cited Oasis LMS's listicle but recommended Kajabi, Thinkific, LearnWorlds, and Teachable—not Oasis.

• Implications:

  • Brands relying on self-serving listicles now help competitors get featured.
  • Sites with higher third-party authority and more robust link profiles fare best.

“Someone at Google was just going when they implemented this. … This is one of those clear exploits people were using and it’s come and smacked them in the face.” (15:32, Ross)

• Traffic Impact:
  • Some SaaS and B2B brands lost 30-50% of their visibility after relying on self-ranked “best” pages.

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5. Local SEO: Google Business Profiles “Collected Info” Actions

[17:44]

• New feature:

  • Google may call, text, or WhatsApp your business to confirm details; this info appears in a “Collected Info” section.
  • You can delete incorrect info.
  • Limited rollout for now.

• Potential pitfalls:

  • May increase scam/spam opportunities.
  • Always verify communications.

“This is going to open up a door for scammers … I see opportunities for abuse.” (18:50, Scott)

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6. Site Moves: The Risks of Domain Changes

[19:05]

• John Mueller (Google) on moving from country-specific to .com:

  • If your site is global and isn’t targeting a specific country, no need to move to .com.
  • A site move is a big deal; impossible to know the outcome fully, even if done right.

  “Even if you take the time to do it right, it’s a lot of work and the outcome is impossible to know fully ahead of time.” (19:25, quoting John Mueller, relayed by Scott)

• Host advice:

  • Only consider switching if you’re truly struggling.
  • High-traffic sites (e.g., 100,000/month) shouldn’t risk it.

• New GSC Guidelines:

  • When migrating a domain, submit Change of Address for all variants in Search Console, including every subdomain, www/non-www.

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7. Review Management: Fixing and Responding to Negative Reviews

[25:22]

• Hosts’ real-world observations:

  • Many local businesses ignore review responses or have broken contact forms/booking buttons—costing big in lost leads.
  • Failing to monitor reviews and mistakenly letting contact details lapse can be disastrous compared to competitors with hundreds or thousands of actively nurtured 4.9-star reviews.

  “Please: reviews are your lifeblood. For any business that builds reviews, you must treat them with kid gloves, love them, nurture them, build as many as you can … and when you get them—reply.” (25:44, Ross) “Today, not so good … their reputations were terrible. If I sent them business, the business would just go poof.” (25:22, Ross)

• Actionable tips:

  • Always respond to reviews, good or bad.
  • If negative, invite to take the matter offline.
  • Regularly check all website contact flows—forms, booking buttons, phone numbers, addresses.
  • Set monthly reminders to test user access/contact forms.

• On fake/unfair reviews:

  • Stepforth can often remove them for a fee ($1,000/review). Legal, above-board process.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On click data conspiracy:

  “I wish someone would leak a little info … why they’re so afraid of showing clicks. There’s a fear factor here. … I think it’s because they realize no one's clicking.” (07:16, Ross)

• On listicle backfiring:

  “Your listicle content can help competitors win the top spot. That’s not such a good thing.” (15:32, Ross)

• On broken booking features:

  “Please check your links for booking appointments, your submission forms … It is not uncommon that those updates can break them. Just mind blowing, really.” (25:22, Ross)

• On domain moves:

  “Outcome is impossible to know fully ahead of time. The risk is just huge. You can go to zero.” (21:48-22:33, Scott)

• On fighting unfair reviews:

  “It’s not a cheap process, but if you think of how much money you’re probably losing from these reviews, it’s a drop in the bucket, honestly.” (31:30, Ross)

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Important Timestamps

• [02:04] Google Ads policy update (cross-domain redirects)
• [03:47] Google June 2026 Spam Update: what it targets, recovery
• [06:06] Search Console AI performance reports (no click data)
• [08:19] Bing AI Performance Reports, country reporting changes
• [13:09] Google AI Overviews & listicle reversal: research findings
• [17:44] Google Business Profile “Collected Info” & scam concerns
• [19:05] Risks and guidance on changing domain names (.ca to .com)
• [24:10] Google’s Change of Address tool: new best practices
• [25:22] Review mismanagement, broken site forms, and reputation disaster stories
• [31:30] Process and cost for review removal help

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Resource Mention

• How to Maintain Rankings after a Redesign:
  Find in the Stepforth.com knowledge base or in the show notes. (23:34, Scott)

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Summary

This episode is packed with actionable insights, especially useful for both beginners and seasoned SEO professionals. The hosts tackle Google and Bing updates, practical site management tips, and strategic advice for protecting both search presence and reputation—infused with their trademark humor and real-world anecdotes.

Key takeaway:
Stay alert to shifting search engine rules, don’t chase shortcuts (like listicles), be vigilant about your contact points & reviews, and never underestimate the risks of domain changes. As always, respond to every customer review—and check those booking buttons!

Transcript

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[Ross Dunn]

Hello and welcome to SEO 101 on WMR FM episode number 532. This is Ross Dun, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing and my co host is my company senior SEO Scott Vanak. We were just discussing how hard it is to work inside this time of year, seeing our family out, having fun. You're muted there. But yeah, life is hard.

[Scott Vanak]

I'm always muted. Every time I have to cough or clear my throat or something, I mute it for a second and then about 50 chance I unmute it after.

[Ross Dunn]

Anyway, it's beautiful outside, but we're gonna work away here. It's just the way things are. I'm sure all you guys are are are feeling for us. All right, well, let's just jump into some non SEO news. I didn't write this one. I didn't write any of them. But this one I don't particularly know. So why don't you go ahead? Sure.

[Scott Vanak]

It's. We don't talk a lot about Google Ads, but I thought this was a little bit interesting and maybe worth mentioning for anyone out there who's running an ad campaign, which is probably a lot of you. So Google is updating its destination mismatch policy in in early July, so that's in the coming weeks to allow for cross domain redirects in specific scenarios. So cross domain redirects, that's where an ad's final URL leads to. A different domain will be permitted, but only with prior Approval from Google this change. So previously your URL in your ad had to reflect where you were sending people. I mean, it makes sense. But now in some cases it won't have to. The change is designed mainly for manufacturers. So for example, consumer packaged goods who want to redirect users to a pre approved list of third party retailer sites. That's the only example that Google actually gives. But you know, it kind of makes sense if you have a product and you don't sell that product directly, but you want to advertise it and then you, you're advertising in ads and then you're sending people off to somewhere that tells them where they can buy that product, where they can purchase it or order it, et cetera. The process for requesting approval has not been detailed yet though, so Google hasn't specified whether it will be via the ads interface, a form, or possibly through your Google representative. This is a significant shift. Google Ads have been around for, I'm going to guess 20 years, maybe longer. I actually don't know anymore. It's been so long for them to allow you to do this now is interesting, but only in select special cases. So I'm guessing only the big players will be the ones that are going to be doing this sort of thing. But we'll see.

[Ross Dunn]

All right, now we're right into SEO news. Google releases the June 2026 spam update this is June 24th. Google launched the June 2026 spam update. A rapid rollout is expected with completion in a few days. We'll see if that's the case. This is the second spam update of 2026, for the last one being back in March. The update is global and applies to all languages. Google is leveraging and improving Spam Brain, its AI based spam prevention system to identify both existing and new types of spam. Sites violating spam policies may see significant ranking drops or be removed from search results entirely. Recovery for penalized sites is slow. Unfortunately. We see that a lot these days. Unfortunately, compliance must be observed for several months before rankings may improve. Which is sad, you know, because all that compliance for nothing in many ways because you're not getting any business. So you'll be doing everything you can to make it look good, but no one will be seeing it. I guess not. No one, but certainly not from Google. Search for link Spam Removing spammy licks won't restore lost rankings. The benefit those links gave is permanently removed. Which makes sense if your site has seen notable declines. After this update, you will need to find what spam policies you are violating and work to correct them. Now, if you're uncertain, you see a big drop, and you really just can't figure out what's going on, let us know. Um, this is right up our alley. We do this all the time. We can figure out what's going on and give you a plan to help you get back into Google's good graces. It's, as said, not the easiest path. And we'll give you other options if there are any, so do keep it in mind. Next up, Google search console. A performance was a performance. What the heck? Canadian there, eh? Google Search Console AI performance reports rolling out to more users. Oh, yay. But no click data anyway. Go ahead. Yeah.

[Scott Vanak]

Yes, yeah. No click data. Exactly. Google has confirmed that they're expanding access to their search console AI performance reports to more users. According to John Mueller on Blue Sky, I still don't have access. Come on, John, where's my access? Actually, I checked all of our clients. None of them have access. So there we go. We're just. He says we're just rolling out incremental. We're just rolling these out incrementally to sites and reviewing the feedback along the way. I know everyone wants the shiny new thing immediately, but first, patience. Haven't we been patient for a long time?

[Ross Dunn]

I don't know.

[Scott Vanak]

I guess not.

[Ross Dunn]

This is not like this is so overdue. It's ridiculous.

[Scott Vanak]

Oh, it's absurd. Based on screenshots I've seen that were posted by. I think it was Barry Swartz at posted the. Oh, it's a search engine. It still might have been Barry. The report appears to be the same as sort of your standard search performance reports that. But it's specific to AI results, so you'll see impressions, pages, countries, devices, dates, and no clicks. It's unclear when everyone will have access. I would imagine soon, hopefully. I. I don't know. But what about the clicks, John? What about the clicks?

[Ross Dunn]

I wish someone would leak a little info from one of these companies about why they're so afraid of showing clicks. There's a fear factor here. There must be, because it's universal. None of them want to show clicks. I think it's because they realize no one's clicking.

[Scott Vanak]

Yeah, they're hiding it. They have to be like, why? That's the metric that we want the most. That's the most important. There's other. Some of the stuff is still good, but. But that's the number one metric we want. And the.

[Ross Dunn]

It's not going to look good. To them for them, and they're going to get hammered and people are going to be up in arms because AI is taking everything. And I don't know why that's going to be a shock to everyone, but I guess they're just trying to avoid that media storm and whatever. Anyway, we're just little old users creating the content that they survive on. Why care about us, right?

[Scott Vanak]

We're their bread and butter, even if it doesn't look that way.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Bing Webmaster Tools is updating their AI reporting Microsoft has launched a enhanced AI Performance reports in Bing Webmaster Tools, now available globally in preview. Previously you could only see the grounding query and the number of citations. Now they've expanded this with four four new features. Number one intents this classifies grounding queries into broader categories such as informational, commercial, navigational, learn and solve, research, creation, and local to reveal the context behind user queries that trigger citations. Topics groups related queries into thematic clusters. For example, solar panels and residential solar installation would both map to solar energy. Aligning reporting with how AI models reason across concepts. That's cool. It's nice to get that kind of insight. Citation Share number three shows the percentage of citations attributed to your site out of all citations for a query. This provides visibility within the citation space, not direct competitor or traffic data. Lastly, compare lets publishers overlay data from previous periods to track changes in AI citation patterns over time and what's missing.

[Scott Vanak]

Scott Clicks do we get click data? Where's that? We're never getting the click data, man. This episode should be called Episode whatever. We're at 530 something. Where's my click data?

[Ross Dunn]

Yes, exactly.

[Scott Vanak]

So mad about it.

[Ross Dunn]

What's going on here? We got another piece of Bing news. Yeah, Bing Webmaster Tools may support more country reporting.

[Guest or Additional Speaker]

Tell us.

[Scott Vanak]

Yeah, this is a pretty small one and I might not have recorded it except or reported it except we already had something about Bing and I thought let's put two Bings in for just for fun. So this is a small update to the Bing Master, Bing whatever I'm trying to say. Bing Webmaster Tools reports under the Search Performance Report. Currently, when you view Search Performance reports and select country Bing List 10 countries and then every other country in the world is listed under rest of the world. And you know, I don't know how many countries there are. We're around 260, 270 countries in the world. Something like that. Like why do they only list 10? I mean, anyways, so after all these years, Bing will finally expand on this data. Barry Schwartz asked Fabrice Canal from Bing about this and he had said we support all countries and regions worldwide. This specific Bing webmaster report will be extended soon to reflect that. So a lot of my clients might not care about other countries, but a lot do. So if you are selling internationally, keep an eye on this. Maybe you'll get a bit of a, I mean you can see some of this in Google Analytics anyways, but still.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah, yeah, you know, who cares about Google? Oh, Bing right now, right?

[Scott Vanak]

Bing is dominating. Don't they have like 98% market? I think I have that backwards. Sorry, I got that. They're missing. They're short 98% market.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah, yeah, that's the bizarro world. Kind of prefer that right now it might be a little more normal than what we were living with, but anyway. All right, well, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about some interesting insights on Google AI overviews that I don't think you'll want to miss.

[Grainger Commercial Voice]

Grainger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them. And to stay ahead, you need to see through walls and around corners. Lights about to fail, filters ready to clog H Vac on its last leg. If you wait until something breaks, you're already behind. Count on Grainger for quality products, easy reordering and 24. 7 support. Call 1-800-GRAINGER click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Guest or Additional Speaker]

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[Ross Dunn]

Welcome back to SEO 101 on WMR FM hosted by myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Stepforth Web Marketing and my company senior SEO Scott Vanack. All right, Google AI overviews cite self serving listicles but recommend competitors 69% of the time. Now just a little back info on here. A while ago Google did this kind of a hammering on people who were posting listicles which are essentially just long lists of. And often they're with competitors saying, well for example, let's say let's say search engine journal posts top podcasts and lists themselves number one, which they do and that gets ranked. And at one point that was really working for them. Well now Google's perhaps still surfacing that content but actually providing 69% of the time the other listings as recommendations versus them. And this has been pretty big. Now Lily Ray analyzed 100 B2B best bracket category software. So that's sort of the quote best CRM software, let's say might be the query. In Google AI overviews across April, May and June 2020 six of the 80 queries that triggered an AI overview, self promotional listicles were cited 323 times. In 224 of those cases, 69% I.e. google cited a brand's own best listicle but did not recommend that brand. Instead, competitors were recommended. Why don't you go with the example here Scott?

[Scott Vanak]

Yeah, so an example is for best LMS. Sorry, best LMS for selling courses, Google cited Oasis LMS's listicle but recommended Kajabi Thinkific. This is why you sent me on this one. These are all weird names. Kajabi Thinkific, Learn Worlds and Teachable, all mentioned in the Oasis article but did not mention Oasis itself.

[Ross Dunn]

So this pattern was seen across categories like Help Desk, Task Management Survey, CRM and SEO software. Brands with stronger organic authority, such as category leaders widely cited by third parties with robust link profiles were more likely to receive recommendations in AI overviews. So they weren't so much hit by this. The data shows a consistent split. A brand's page can be cited as a source while its competitors are recommended. Someone at Google was just going when they implemented this. Would have loved to have seen it. I can't blame them. This is one of those clear exploits people were using and it's come and smacked them in the face. Kind of a chuckle worthy. Definitely moment. Many sites relying on these self promote promotional listicles saw significant organ or organic traffic declines starting in early 2026. But we're really really doing well with words today. Your listicle content can help competitors win the top spot. That's not such a good thing. So that will be something that's losing a bit of its weight these days. And you know what? Anytime I've done a listicle in the past, I hope I'm not wrong here because it's generally against my brain to do anything else. I've always tried to lead with the people who I thought were the best and then if we qualified to be even in the list I would put us there where I thought we should be but you know, whatever. People are trying to make money and I get it. If it worked, it worked. Previous research showed that some software as a service and B2B brands lost 30 to 50% of their visibility after relying on self ranked best pages. Interesting. Okay, Local SEO News Google Business Profiles New Collected Info Actions Weird title. What's this all about?

[Scott Vanak]

Yeah, so now Google's added a new feature called Collected Info within Google Business Profiles and now they may call text or WhatsApp, your verified Google Business Profile phone number to confirm business details and fill out additional information. These results the results of these calls will be shown in a selection a section. You see you said we were having trouble with words and now I don't know how to speak or or read or any of that stuff. The results of these calls will be shown in a section called Collected Info Seen. When you want to edit your profile, you can delete anything in the Collected info that is not accurate. It is currently available for select regions, languages and business categories that may not be available for all users. So you may or may not see this show up, but the first thing I thought of when I saw this is because they'll call text or WhatsApp. This is going to open up a door for scammers texting people and I don't know, I just see I see opportunities for scammers and abuse. I don't know exactly how but pretty

[Ross Dunn]

much every time there's something that happens it's you see opening for scammers.

[Scott Vanak]

Yeah, no kidding, right?

[Ross Dunn]

Why don't you take the next one here? So Google site move outcomes impossible to fully know ahead of time according to John Mueller.

[Scott Vanak]

Yeah, so I've got this about John Mueller and then a little follow up post after that that's not really John Mueller but relevant. So a site owner posted to an SEO sub on Reddit with concerns that their two year old site hosting a CA domain was limiting their international exposure. They are considering switching to a.com with hopes of furthering their global exposure and they're asking if the headache of switching would be worthwhile. I didn't write this in the notes, but they had also said in their post that their international audience had been growing steadily as well. So they aren't only being displayed in Canada, they are a global presence and growing. John's response was if you're not explicitly targeting any particular country, if your site is basically just global, then you don't need to switch to a generic tld. A site move is always a big Deal. Even if you take the time to do it right, it's a lot of work and the outcome is impossible to know fully ahead of time. So essentially I agree with him. He kind of says it in a weird way. That kind of threw me off a little bit though when he talks about if you're not targeting a particular country, which this person is, this site is. But at the same time they're doing well, they have an international audience, it's growing. I basically never recommend switching a top level domain. Like there are very, very few cases where I would suggest doing such a move. Especially in this case because they said in their Reddit post they were getting about a hundred thousand visitors a month. I don't think I'd want to mess with that. You know, if you have no traffic and you might have little risks to worry about, but if you have visitors like that, you don't want to risk that.

[Ross Dunn]

Now 5,000 articles, they'd have to move. Wow.

[Scott Vanak]

In two years they've been busy. This does sort of touch.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah, sorry, I. I was just thinking it. The thing about it that I find interesting is he doesn't say what you're supposed to do. He says if your site's basically just global, then you don't need to switch to a global top level domain. A gtld. But if there.ca's used to, apparently not anymore. But when you got a ca, you would show up better in Canada. It didn't limit. Didn't mean that you wouldn't show up elsewhere, but you would show up better in your source country. So he's not really telling you how you can get around that though. Anyway, don't move your domain. Have you run into that? I mean, have you. What, what's your thoughts on that?

[Scott Vanak]

I haven't really. I mean we've had people change their domains actually I feel like we had somebody one time switch from a.net to a.com or something like that.

[Ross Dunn]

But that would go away from. Not from a country level.

[Scott Vanak]

No, I've never had a client switch either to or from a country specific top level domain. I don't know that I would recommend it though. Like I suppose let's just use Canada and dot com. So if I had a dot com and I really wanted to push Canada only, maybe I'd considered switching to a dot ca. But I would only really do that if I was struggling. If my business was going well and growing and performing well, I wouldn't. I don't want to touch that. The risk is just huge. It's huge risk. You can go to zero.

[Ross Dunn]

Yeah, like in this case, he says most of their business and traffic is outside of Canada. Canada is their third biggest market. So as you said, they're already getting traffic and it's not all from Canada. It's very low apparently compared to the other traffic they're getting. So it seems like they're already getting the visibility they need. Maybe it's imagined this, this limitation. It is like if I were consulting with a client right off the bat without knowing all this information, I would say, okay, that might be limiting you by having a ca, but once you learn more about it, it does seem like that's less of an issue than it sounds. It's strange though, but like your example going from dot com to ca. Yeah, I agree. But if I had a CA and I was worried about it not showing up, I guess it would depend just how far down the road you are. I had 5,000 articles, maybe I wouldn't want to make that move. It's another it depends moment. I think it totally is.

[Scott Vanak]

That's everything. I will do. A little shameless plug though as well here. If you are thinking about a redesign or thinking about changing domain names on our website stepworth.com there is a post in our web marketing knowledge base called how to maintain Rankings after a Redesign and it is very comprehensive and touches on just about everything. You will find a full link in the Show Notes. It's a long URL that I'm not going to try to say in a podcast because you'll just lose it. But you can go to the website and you can find it there as well or in the Show Notes.

[Ross Dunn]

Okay, was there a second half of this?

[Scott Vanak]

And this, this next part is kind of the second half and that's for site moves. Google has changed their recommendations for well, they haven't changed, they've added it specifying domain variants in the when using the Change of Address tool in Google Search Console. So they updated their document their documentation regarding this Google posted for domain migrations. If you're moving your site from one domain to another, make sure to submit change of address requests for all subdomains and the www and non WWW variants of the old domain name. For example en.example.com, www.example.com and example.com to new-example.net even if you're not actively using these variants, ensure that you have done these variants. Ensure that you have all these variants verified in Search Console. I think a lot of people it's interesting that they're adding this now. But I think a lot of people don't think about moving their subdomains. They think that just doing the change of address to the top level domain will automatically apply to their subdomains. That that's not the case. You definitely want to do that with your subdomains and everything. So just keep it consistent.

[Ross Dunn]

All right. Now I wanted to cover something that came up today. I've been doing a lot of sales calls lately and just so you know, for anyone listening, when you do want to talk to anyone to step forth about your service, what you know what, you might need any help, you're going to talk to me. That's it. I'm the guy. Uh, and we've got a lead generation company working for us right now which is getting us a lot of sales calls, which is really interesting to me. I love it, I love talking to people and I, and I find it fascinating seeing the issues they're facing and some of their profiles, some of them are great. Today, not so good. I the two first leads I got today which unfortunately were no shows. Maybe fortunately, unfortunately it's hard to say simply because their reputations were terrible. I mean we have all heard about the companies that really don't deserve to be, to exist. I don't know if that's the case in these, with these people. Maybe they just literally had a hard time at one point and earned some bad reviews. But even when reviews were good, they were not responding. They weren't going in saying thank you so much for your review. They weren't showing that they cared. You have to do that, please. Reviews are your lifeblood. For any business that builds reviews. You must treat them with kid gloves, love them, nurture them, build as many as you can, work hard to keep building them and when you get them reviews, reply to them and they're negative. Hey, say, you know, I'm so sorry to hear what you've been through. I'm sure we can resolve this. Please reach out to our phone number at, reach out to me at this number. Just post that. It takes it offline. It shows people that you care and when they call you can deal with it there. And very good odds providing you, you know, you have a good, I guess plan in place that you can turn them into happy customers in the end and they will, they can go back and change their review. Now that said, when you don't do this, and this is what happened with one of these prospects today, they just didn't pay attention to the reviews and they never replied and it's gotten so bad that I, when I flagged it when I was doing my research, I thought, oh, I don't even know if I can take these people on. How do we get back from this? Because they're all around them are a couple competitors that have literally almost a thousand reviews. One of them had over a thousand reviews and they're got a 4.9 out of 5 rating, whereas these guys have a few hundred and they're 3.9, 3.8, something like that. And some of the reviews are so bad, I would run. There's nothing. There's nothing. If I sent them business, I'm sure that the business would be just would go poof. It would literally. They probably wouldn't even call them. And then if they tried to. This is another thing they can't do. Scott and I were chuckling over this because it's just so amazing that this could be missed. Their book appointment buttons were broken on their website. Every single one. And this is not rare. I've seen a lot of this over the last week being the last two weeks. Been doing these as I've been doing these calls. I've found a lot of issues with that. Please check your links for booking appointments, your submission forms, anytime you have an update to your website, even a plugin, a simple plugin update. Take a second submit an inquiry through your system or book. Click on the book button. Do something to make sure that your path to income is still working. Because it is not uncommon that those updates can break them. Just mind blowing really. How bad it was that some of these, these people I looked at, one of them even had the wrong physical address at the top of their page versus at the bottom of their page. What small but like what? It's just inexplicable at times. And another one the other day, wonderful lady, we had a great discussion and when I was looking at her Google business profile, I said, oh, did you know that your phone number is not there? What now? It could easily have been a competitor. It could have been. Who knows who told Google to remove it? I don't know. She's very on top of things. I'd be very surprised if she forgot or in something. It's probably something nefarious. But that's a good example if someone needs to be watching these things and we do that like a hawk. And if you don't want to hire someone, you need to as well. Make sure that the phone number is there, make sure that your address isn't being changed, make sure that your URL isn't being changed in some circumstances. I've seen hackers, well, not hackers, nefarious people going in and saying, no, no, that's not the URL, this is the URL. And sending business to someone else, it's insane. Google just doesn't care. Its system is so broken in many regards that you just have to monitor it. Now if you do have unfair and fake reviews and there are a ton of them out there and they can do huge damage to your business, let us know. We have a service. We can sometimes remove them. We go through the full process. None of this is below board, is all above board. We're following legal processes and we have a very good track record of having them removed. This could be some someone just going ballistic on you about your business and it's just out of hand and you know it looks bad and you haven't had any success removing it, let us know. It's not a cheap process, but it's $1,000 per review. But if you think of how much money you're probably losing from these reviews, it's a drop in the bucket, honestly. And it's your last ditch alternative, like your last ditch option. So just keep that in mind and let us know if we can help you out. Anyway, that was a little bit of a rant, but I just could not believe what I've been seeing. And it I'm sure just one of you out there finds this issue and fixes it, you'll be happy I said it and I hope you do. Please do check these things. It is well worth it. Just imagine how much business you could be losing if these are not running. And don't just do it once. Set up a reminder check form, you know, check booking, make sure it's working. Do it once a month and if you find a break and broken once in a while, check it more than once a month. Don't just continue to check once a month. It could be something that happens regularly and you need to be on top of it because you could be losing quite a bit of business. All right, brand complete. Well, on behalf of Myself, Ross Dunn, CEO of Step 4th Web Marketing and my company senior SEO Scott Vanack, thank you very much for joining us today. Remember, we have a show notes newsletter you can sign up [e-mail] have a great week and remember to tune into future episodes which air almost every week on WMR fm.

[Scott Vanak]

Thank you for listening everybody.

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