One recourse would be to find the business website, and verify against that – but the data there might also be faked/exaggerated/not quite the truth.

They could use other business listings as a check, but can those also be completely trusted? In any case, most are seeded with a small amount of fake data to catch out content copiers.

It’s a difficult problem to crack I think.

Thanks for stopping by and clarifying.

The issue for me is that as an industry we should not tolerate either mediocrity or illegality and Google should be called out on both fronts loud and clear.

Google has, on occasion, responded positively to such inputs. One example was their creating an explicit public forum to note spamming.

Again way too little and better late than never but it gives me hope that they do occasionally hear the tune even if they are for the most part tone deaf.

Mike

Thanks for taking the time to comment on the Bruce Clay blog, and for bringing the conversation back here.

I agree with you. On all of it. I simply look at these guidelines as the first (small) step in getting Local where it needs to be. Before there were no standards of any kind, now at least there are.

Don’t take my post as a sign that I’m satisfied with Google’s results. I think they need to be more proactive in maintaining the integrity of the results and not simply hand editing certain queries when something gets called out, but to be honest, I don’t know that it will ever happen. Google’s not looking at Local with the intensity that it needs to be. They’re looking at organic, they’re fighting the paid link battle, they’re paying attention to how many people are buying ads. They’re not focused on Local Search. Which is a mistake, because they’re the only ones with the data to really improve it.

Local results should be held to a higher standard than organic. They’re more important. Like you said, had that query for [simi valley vet] been tainted, I would have been lost with no way to figure out where to go. I got lucky that the results were clean. Google needs to make sure that “luck” doesn’t play a part in whether its users get good results.

[They] “have human and manual moderation that goes on for changes, so … submissions all go through a moderation process where we look for patterns and we actually do validation of data to make sure it is accurate”.

On my last submission, it took 2 days for them to look at and when they were done, they emailed and said it was approved. So not only was it vetted, there was good feedback to me and it felt like customer service…killed three birds with one stone as it were.

Mike

One of my fellow Cre8 mods has gotten 2 phone calls from Yahoo this week offering him a premium listing in Yahoo Local. Interesting to see this far more pro-active approach from Yahoo as opposed to Google.

Miriam