Google plus Removes Mashable, Sesame Street

Google Removes Mashable, Sesame Street and other accounts from google +:

Some of the biggest company/brand accounts on Google+ have now — finally, some might say — been removed.

The Google Plus pages for Mashable, Ford and Sesame Street are all gone. Mashable was, according to SocialStatistics.com, the No. 4 most popular account on Google+ with more than 103,000 followers.

All of those accounts have been replaced by a 404 error message. (Update: see postscript at the end of this article.)

Google has been removing business/brand accounts for more than a week now, but some users were unhappy with the random nature of the process. Some accounts were zapped early on while others seemed to get special treatment, or at least were ignored, and continued to increase their following.

It’s been a rocky few weeks for companies and brands wanting to have a presence on Google+. Within a week of Plus’ launch, Google announced that business pages would be coming soon, but days later had to ask brands to stop making new accounts. Google eventually invited businesses to apply to be part of a test program and accepted applications through last Friday.

The most recent news about Google+ for businesses was this message last week from Google’s Christian Oestlien, who said that Google would be “selecting a diverse set of business partners for the test period” and notifying them this week. Here at Search Engine Land, we did get a notification that our Google Plus account has been suspended, but there’s no invitation to a test program.