There are a lot of rumors and suspicions that Google My Business suspensions are due to the release of the new shortnames feature. I am not sure if that is true, we covered the suspension issues well before the launch of the shortnames release and we even covered these rumors earlier as well.
I personally think they are unrelated - I think there is a weird issue with Google My Business suspending a lot of businesses and then because of the support delays this issue is piling up.
To some up, the suspension issues spiked around June 12th and continued from there. The release of shortnames was around June 20th. And Google admitted in late June the Google My Business team is super backlogged.
It's true! Had 4 out of 44 locations get swiped off the interwebs. Discovered Google was suggesting names with underscores and those were the ones affected. After we removed the short links, we opened the settings again, this time it was same name but with hypens.
— Morgan Porter (@mporter1144) July 10, 2019
And folks discussing it at Local Search Forums.
But the rumors that shortnames and suspensions are related and people are removing their shortnames out of fear. I am not sure if that is the right move - I can be wrong, but I think it is just a coincidence.
Now, if only Google would chime in on the issue and communicate with the local SEO community about it...
Forum discussion at Local Search Forums.
