That was the first time that we noticed that something was wrong; Our listings got merged with an unknown “Locksmith Company’s” listings.

Till September 08 (!!) we blamed Google for using an over-aggressive algorithm that brought us to this strange situation that our listings’ details were being controlled by someone else (Google maybe?..).

After we succeeded in taking out the foreign details, they came back in a different form (different URL/ phone #s, email address, etc..). Then we understood that a real person was controlling our listings.

After consulting my colleagues we embarked on an experiment that might help us understand the new status of our listings. Well, we succeeded in hijacking our own listings & our spammy competitor’s ones (of course we didn’t proceed with this, we stopped the hijacking experiment after 3 successes & posted this issue to Mike that helped us to open Google’s eyes).

That’s for the history aspect.

NOW, I can guarantee to all that hijacking is still an “open issue”! The tactics are the same. How do I know that? Well, Google cleaned up most of our listings in the last 2 months. When we first saw that, we recreated the same listings. After the ones that got cleaned up, came back (we are still astonished from that) the duplicated ones got merged.

But hey, didn’t Google say that this can’t be done anymore? OK, so they said.. many of our other listings got hijacked again by the black hats in the past month..

Mike, I’m starting to worry that probably some black hats companies (that are not from the locksmith industry ?) are using the tactics of mapjacking.

For the many that had their listings changed/ merged, I have 2 suggestion here-

1. Don’t be naive!! BUT (I think) it’s still too early to determine whether it’s a tsunami of hijackings or some bug from Google end.

2. Flood the Google Maps Help forum with posts on this issue. And don’t create more listings on top of the ones that got “cleaned” or for the ones that got merged (I did it & Google keeps kicking me out, although I’ve did everything to purify its Maps feature) I think that this will cause harm to Google’s cleaning up procedure.

Postscript-

It’s quite hard to me to say it by I must- I’m hoping that many of you good folks can feel what I’m feeling in the last year, when a 1.5 years of legitimate local campaign got crushed by scammers, Google’s lack of ‘listening-help-solve’ the problem & for us been forced to choose – the black side or to the OUT (of business) side.

& another issue-(if I’m already posting for the first time, here, at Mike’s place)- To all of You that are suggesting to Google to block sites that spam Gmaps- please STOP that! The scammers are using our URLs & national brand name to gain credibility & to smother us even more. The complaints of customers that got ripped-off by those companies are piling up in our entry at the BBB site. We’re clueless for what can be our next steps as the scammers are almost unreachable. PLEASE DON’T ADD OIL TO THE FIRE!!

& again- I’m hoping that NO one of you will experience what we are experiencing in the last year.

What are your thoughts Mike?

Usually though there are two records each sharing some part of the information and there is a common thread tieing the two together. There is a stated sense amongst users that they might have been hijacked by the lawyer on the floor above or the jerk down the hall but it really is a problem with Google’s clustering algo.

My theory is that the Locksmith Highjackers leveraged this weakness. The question now is why are records that look like they truly have been hijacked showing up again. Did Google close the loop hole, is it a new loophole, or is it a new more malicious merging…. who knows but in the end the smb doesn’t care the cause all he/she knos is that his traffic is plummeting and there record has been messed with.

@Miriam

Only Google knows the timeline of these changes and when they integrated more data from each change and ultimately how it happened.

Mike

A 50% drop in traffic is certainly a testament to the power of Google local, and a rather horrifying amount of sway over the fate of a business if the listing is hijacked or simply wrong. Sheesh.

I hope Marty’s article, and yours, will get some emergency attention from Google.