You can use a mail forwarding service or virtual office to create a dummy location. It is a little more expensive than this method, but less prone to Google’s countermeasures to the 1st address line manipulation. Just be sure to map the address you are going to use – before purchasing it – to make sure it is not overloaded.

that summarize everything really nice & help you think what will be next, Or how Google will fight it.

just as a heads up- the biggest Spam technique that I’ve ever encountered with (& I’ve encountered & exposed heaps of them ) was revealed couple of weeks ago.

We’ll publish it soon. Get ready to be amazed from it simplicity & impact.

“Places” spam – the new front in the spam wars.

It’s not a joke any more. So many SEO people are doing this that Google Places results are turning into junk in popular categories.

“Mountain View, we have a problem”.

Then, Google doesn’t check the address against business records, like corporate registrations, business licenses, or Dun and Bradstreet. So Google can easily be suckered into displaying phony locations.

This is just one of many ways to overcome Google’s verification system. Others I’ve seen used include getting a chain of low-end convenience stores to forward Google’s postcards, getting temporary phone numbers from the gray market for phone number verification, and, of course, opening GMail accounts in bulk for email verification.

Google Places spamming is going industrial-scale. There are ads on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk freelancer market for Google Places spammers. Several heavily promoted commercial products and services are already available for spamming Google Places in bulk. Look up “Google Places Unleashed” and “Dominate Google Places” for some painful reading.

Craigslist faced many of the same problems, and lost that battle. Many categories on Craigslist are now mostly spam. Google search could go down the drain in the same way. Google had a good handle on blocking organic web search spam via link farms, but they have no clue about what to do about Places spam. Spamming Places turns out to be very easy, much easier than link farming. Google’s merging of Places results into web search could turn out to be the biggest marketing mistake since New Coke.

I’m writing a paper on this.

Great experiment! You are at the wrong biz. You should go Locksmith!!