The Google Business Listing service sellers are almost as bad as the 17x professional resume writers.
A bit of history: when I started Bredemarket I also set up a Google Business Listing, which also included a free ugly Google website to promote my business. I poured my energies into bredemarket.com instead.
I’d occasionally add content to my Google Business Listing, but sometimes Google would flag the content for some unknown reason, and eventually Google flagged the entire Google Business Listing for some unknown reason. (Google: “You violated our TOS, but we won’t tell you why. You figure out what you did.”) By this point I was happy to be rid of the thing.
But I’m still getting calls at least once a week from companies that want me to get my Google Business Listing properly verified. When I tell these companies that losing my Google Business Listing was the best thing that ever happened to me, they usually hang up.
Usually.
My “Google” review (which wasn’t about me, and wasn’t on Google)
Today the caller was persistent, mentioning at one point that Bredemarket had five star reviews saying “I was blown away with this service”…from a resume writing service. I asked for the date of the review, and the caller couldn’t tell me. And you know how I feel about some resume writing services anyway.
After this caller finally gave up on selling their services, I searched Google for a five-star review of Bredemarket.
I ended up at Bredemarket’s Yelp page…which has no reviews. But if you scroll down, you see sponsored content about OTHER websites…including
KStar Professional Resume Writing Services, for which a reviewer wrote “I was blown away with this service.”
So instead of a five star Google review of Bredemarket, there is a five star review of a completely separate resume writing service that appears in the sponsored ads for Bredemarket’s Yelp page.
Bredemarket 