Andrew Shotland has a recent report of SEO mapspam from a Vegas company called SEOChampion posting local listings for SEO services in his backyard. When he searched on Pleasanton SEO he found two spammy looking listings in the onebox. He drove to one address and discovered that the address doesn’t exist in Pleasanton.
I did a little more digging and found that this firs has listings in many metro areas around the country. Often with two listings in each. My most frutiful search showed at least 30 listings scattered across the US. With a little digging I am sure that I could find more but I am on vacation. A cursory glance at the streetview address in Phoenix showed their Phoenix address as located in a parking lot.
In their Phoenix listings they even bothered to add an “A” to the beginning of one of their listings. Nothing like those old Yellowpages tactics.
Next time you are in Topeka, Cedar Rapids, Fort Smith (?), Des Moines, Springville, Mobile….be sure to not stop by but give them a call as the Google Directions might just lead you astray.
Well, for gosh sakes. SEO Champion needs to come up with some better strategies than spamming Maps. How about some decent content creation, link building…uhmm…something…
Good catch Andrew & Mike. The list continues to grow!
Miriam
Comment by MiriamEllis (636 comments) — April 8, 2008 @ 3:33 pm
Hi Miriam
Yes it is very bizarre isn’it. I guess all search is local after all.
Mike
Comment by Mike Blumenthal (1962 comments) — April 9, 2008 @ 10:53 am
[...] Mike Blumenthal has a sort of funny and sort of sad story about a company making up addresses to get into local searches. It made me laugh because the company in question is comically bad, but it also made me sad because [...]
Pingback by Local Search Updates - Yahoo and Google — eClick Performance Blog — April 11, 2008 @ 4:18 pm