Here’s the situation: you check on your business’s local listing and discover that it has been suspended. How long has it been suspended? Why has it been suspended? There are a wide variety of reasons that Google might suspend your local listing. It is important to remember not to panic. Google will not tell you why your listing was suspended, simply because they do not want to tell people who have broken their rules how to avoid being flagged.

There are essentially two different types of suspension. In the first type, you can no longer manage your account. Essentially, your listing is no longer verified. This is likely due to breaking one of Google’s guidelines. With this type of suspension, your ranking is usually not affected and still shows up on Google Maps.

In the second type of suspension, your listing is going to be completely removed from Google. Not only will you get the “suspended” banner on your Google My Business account, you will not be able to find your business on Google’s local results. When this occurs, you will have to get Google to reinstate your listing, though keep in mind that Google only does this very rarely.

Here are the reasons why Google likely suspended your listing:

You add extra words to your business name.

This will only result in Google un-verifying your local listing, since the name you have listed your business under does not match the other listings. For example, if your business’s name is “Shoes Plus,” but you list the name as “Shoes Plus Walton Street” because your business is on Walton Street, this will often result in a suspension.

You list your address even though you are a service area business.

What does this mean? It means that your business is not actually located in an area, but you provide a service to that area. In this instance, you should hide your address, because your customers do not actually show up at your address in order to do business with you. Google will suspend listing that do this because they do not want those listings to show up on Google Maps. If you are a service area business, you do not need to list your address.

You list a forwarding URL as your website.

This is a huge problem for Google. If they sense that you are using an URL that actually forwards to another site, you are going to see your listing suspended. They also do not want to see URLs that direct users to landing pages. Use your real URL, to your website.

You use a mailbox or virtual office for your address.

If your listing uses a mailbox or a temporary office as its address, you’re probably going to see a suspension. They do not want you to create a page for that location unless your staff is actually at that office during your open hours. So, if you do have a temporary office where a customer could arrive and find you working there, this address is probably fine to include. Any other address, including a post office box, where your staff is not actually going to be located, is not going to work. Google dislikes this practice because many businesses register mailboxes or virtual offices around town in order to rank in multiple locations, even if they are not actually located there.

Your business is entirely online and does not have a storefront.

Local listings are for businesses that have physical storefronts where customers or clients can meet with the business owners or their employees. In order to be eligible for a local listing, your clients or customers have to be able to actually come to your business and meet with you. Online businesses do not need this functionality, so they cannot have a local listing. If your business is entirely online and you create a local listing, Google will probably suspend it.

You operate in a location that you do not represent.

For example, if you run an AA meeting out of a church, you cannot create a local listing for that meeting at that church, because you do not have authority to represent that location. Basically, if you operate in a location that you do not own, you cannot create a local listing for your class or service. This does not include, however, businesses that rent office space or storefronts, since, in that situation, you would have authority to represent the space as your own.

You created more than one listing for the same business.

While you can create different listings for different locations of your business, do not create more than one listing for each location. Google will probably suspend both of the listings, completely removing one and taking away the other’s verification. This is seen as an attempt to game the ranking system and because there is very little else that it could be, the search engine usually just suspends all involved listings.

Your industry is full of spam.

You might be suspended and you actually didn’t do anything wrong. If your industry is full of spam listings in your area, Google might seriously tighten up their guidelines and suspend listings right and left, even if there is nothing technically wrong with them. You just looked like spam.