Nothing ruins a Monday quite like an email telling you a stranger now owns your website in Google. Thousands of site owners got exactly that message yesterday morning. Almost none of it was true.
It was a Search Console fault, and Google has said so. But the day also brought a real deadline on your product photos, a review problem Google admits it cannot yet fix, and a change in how Google credits your offline sales. Here is what to do about each one.
Search and SEO
Google sent a wave of alarming owner emails that meant nothing
On Monday morning Search Console emailed a large number of site owners with the line “Google has identified that this address has been added as an owner of your property”. Barry Schwartz received several. So did plenty of agencies. When people went to check, the accounts named already had access and nothing had actually changed. John Mueller told people not to panic, but to use the moment to confirm that everyone verified on the property should still be there.
Why this matters for your business: This email is indistinguishable from what a real account takeover looks like, which is why it frightened people. Take Mueller’s advice literally. Open Search Console, go to Settings, then Users and permissions, and read the list. Most small businesses have a former agency, a departed developer or a freelancer still holding owner rights from years ago. Remove anyone who no longer works on the site. Do the same in Google Ads, Google Business Profile and your WordPress admin while the thought is fresh. A false alarm is a cheap reason to run an audit you have probably been putting off.
Reviews are disappearing when a suspended profile comes back
Google confirmed on Monday that it knows about a problem where a Google Business Profile is reinstated after a suspension and returns without its reviews. Google says it is working on a resolution. It has given no date for one. The complaint threads in the Business Profile community run back several months, so this is not new, it is only newly acknowledged.
Why this matters for your business: Your reviews are the single strongest thing on your listing and you do not own them. If a suspension takes them, you have no copy and no recourse beyond a support queue. Export what you have this week. Screenshot the review panel, save the reviewer names and dates in a spreadsheet, and copy your best three or four onto your own website with the reviewer’s first name. Then reduce your suspension risk. Most suspensions come from an address change, a category change, a service area edit or a keyword stuffed business name, so make those edits carefully and one at a time.
Social Media
LinkedIn opened collaborative posts to brands and creators
LinkedIn has moved its Collaborative Posts feature out of testing and into general availability. A single post can carry up to five co-authors, and they can be personal profiles or company pages. Every collaborator is listed at the top, and once someone accepts, the post appears on their profile as well rather than sitting in one feed. You invite them through the Add collaborators option in the sharebox, or the Create menu for a page.
Invitations have to be accepted, and for a company page an admin has to accept on the page’s behalf, so nobody can attach your brand to a post without you agreeing to it. Anyone who declines simply does not appear, and the post stays with whoever published it.
Why this matters for your business: Company pages on LinkedIn reach almost nobody compared with the people who work at the company, and this closes that gap without asking your staff to reshare anything. Pick your next real announcement, a new hire, a completed project, a supplier partnership, and publish it as a collaboration between the company page and the two people actually involved. One post, three profiles. There is a catch worth knowing before you build any reporting on it: a page added as a collaborator does not get post level engagement metrics, only its own page analytics, so decide up front which account needs to see the numbers.
YouTube now counts a view from the very first frame
From 24 August a public view on YouTube registers the moment playback starts, with no minimum watch time, across long form video, Shorts and live streams. Long form previously needed roughly thirty seconds of watch time before a view was counted. Shorts have worked this way since March 2025, so this extends the same rule to everything else.
Earnings are untouched. Monetisation and YouTube Partner Program eligibility still run on Engaged views, which keep the watch time requirement, and the thresholds are unchanged at 8,000 qualified watch hours or 20 million qualified Shorts views. Engaged views still sit in YouTube Analytics under Advanced Mode.
Why this matters for your business: Your view counts are about to rise without anything actually improving, and the jump lands on 24 August, so any month on month comparison that straddles that date measures a definition change rather than growth. Write the date into your reporting notes now, before somebody presents the bump as a result. If you pay an agency or a creator on views, this is the week to check which number your agreement refers to, because public views and engaged views have just moved further apart.
Paid Search
Your product photos need to be 500 pixels square by January
Google emailed Merchant Center users on Monday to confirm that from 31 January 2027 every image submitted through image_link or additional_image_link must be at least 500 by 500 pixels, across all product categories. The old floors of 100 by 100 for general products and 250 by 250 for clothing fall away. Google recommends 1500 by 1500 or larger. Accounts with undersized images are already showing an “image too small due to upcoming policy changes” warning, and those warnings started back in April.
Why this matters for your business: You have five months, which sounds generous until you count the products. Open Merchant Center, filter for the warning, and see how many items are affected. If the number is small, reshoot or re-export those images. If it runs into the hundreds, the fix belongs upstream in whatever generates your feed. Also worth saying plainly, 500 pixels is a low bar and a photo that small still looks poor beside a competitor’s. Aim for the recommended 1500.
Automotive
Google ignores any sale you upload more than seven days late
This one is real news and it lands hardest on dealers. Google Ads documentation confirms that offline conversions uploaded more than seven days after the click still appear in your standard reporting columns, but the attribution engine ignores them entirely. Consultant Adriaan Dekker circulated the finding on 22 August after Hana Kobzova spotted it. So your Google Ads dashboard and your attribution reports will disagree, and neither is wrong.
Why this matters for your dealership: Nobody buys a car in seven days. The lead arrives, the salesperson calls, a test drive happens the following weekend, finance takes another week, and the deal signs a month later. If your DMS or CRM pushes that sale back to Google when it closes, you have already missed the window and Google will not credit the campaign that produced it. That is how a source that genuinely sells cars ends up looking dead in your reporting while a source that only generates form fills looks healthy. Cox Automotive and Clarivoy have found that 92 percent of marketplace assisted vehicle sales cannot be traced in dealer CRM systems, so the attribution picture was already poor before this. Two fixes. Upload a mid-funnel event inside the seven days, a booked test drive or a qualified phone call, and treat that as the conversion your bidding optimises against. Then keep uploading the final sale for your own margin reporting, knowing Google will not attribute it. Check with your CRM provider this week which of the two your integration actually sends.
What to do this week
- Open Search Console, read Users and permissions, and remove anyone who no longer works on your site.
- Export your Google reviews to a spreadsheet and put your best few on your own website.
- Filter Merchant Center for the image size warning and count how many products are affected.
- Ask your CRM provider how quickly it pushes conversions to Google Ads, and whether it can send a mid-funnel event.
- Publish your next company announcement as a LinkedIn collaboration with the people involved.
- Note 24 August on your YouTube reporting so the view count jump is not mistaken for growth.
If you would rather someone else watched all of this on your behalf, that is what we do. Get in touch with Maple Leaf Agency and we will take a look at your setup.
Sources
- Google Search Console Sends New Owner Email Notifications, Search Engine Roundtable
- Google Aware Of Reviews Missing After Business Profile Reinstatement, Search Engine Roundtable
- Merchant Center Product Images Minimum Size Will Be 500×500, Search Engine Roundtable
- Google Ads Reduces Conversion Cycle For Maximize Conversion Value Bidding, Search Engine Roundtable
- Google Ads Attribution Ignores Offline Conversions Uploaded After 7 Days, PPC Land
- LinkedIn Caps Collaborative Posts at Five and Blocks Page Engagement Metrics, PPC Land
- YouTube Splits Its View Count in Two, Tech Times