Used to be domain hijacking, now it’s this.

I don’t think the day will come when technology defeats human ingenuity!

I’ve had 23 spam listings for my address or business name alone. Some with my business name and address, some with another business name, and my address. By asking for verifacation on this scam listings at LBC, for those listings that use my address I get a postcard and I can claim and then delete the listing.

Recently I added a new listing with a different name, and within a month the same name was listed with a different address and contact info. Not sure how I’ll go about changing or claiming that local listing.

Spammers remain a moving target…

The tactics used by this florist in NZ were strictly rookie kinds of behaviors that only would work against unsophisticated business owners who had not yet claimed their listings.

It is unclear whether the actions of the company that your client was dealing with were unethical or not. Without some analysis that would be difficult to determine. In my opinion not money well spent. It would make more sense to spend the money creating a sustainable presence online.

I would however suggest that choosing an ethical professional in the local search field requires no less due diligence than choosing an ethical provider in any field. A place to start that search is Getlisted.org’s list of trusted local search providers. There are certainly a number of operations that use tactics that are less than appropriate.

“Is this Accurate” is a new feature so we don’t know how Google relies on it versus the many other signals that they look at and what sort of measures they have put in place to prevent fraud.

@Ryan
Quality issues, including hijackings, have plagued Maps since day one, over 4 years ago. While it may be a priority, they have not really applied the time and energy necessary to wrestle the whole problem to the ground. Glen’s comments are indicative of that. The locksmith issues have been on-going in Maps now for almost two years. So while I laud their focus, I will respect their results. good luck on your new blog.

@John
John, it started in the US and even with the experience Google garnered here they were unable or unwilling to change their user generated content system enough to prevent it from happening elsewhere in much the same way when they rolled out the capability elsewhere. See Glen’s comment for proof that is has been around in the US

@Glenn
Are you seeing the bad results just in SD? Statewide?

Not sure if there was another Google change in the last few days, as the spam and highjack crowd just got everything back. In my little corner of the world, we dropped off the map again on Friday night. Local search for us had been good for 4 weeks, after months (years?) of being overwhelmed with spam.

This recent change has a few spam folks rising back onto the Map, and we are off local altogether, making me wonder about other ways to highjack besides editing the local listing?

The Google local search for “Locksmith San Diego” is at 65% spam or fraudulent addresses. For 4 weeks we were at 10% spam, so I was thinking Google had a little jump on the black hats.
False hope.