Mike I know I said I’d stay away, but Miriam, I never used mirror sites. I am not that stoopid.

Well capitalism is a funny beast.

It promotes this sort of behavior. Businesses take these calculated risks all the time in an effort to achieve super profits. Walmart does it by making people work off the clock and figuring that the gains will be worth the penalties when they finally get caught. And having good lawyers they will fight like hell to minimize the penalties. Another example of that would be GE in the Hudson River dumping case.

I would wonder whether Mr. Silvers knows of the risk and if he does I doubt that he has enough information to calculate the possible downsides of the strategy. No one does at this point. But I am sure he has good lawyers

Getting benefits illicitly (ala John D Rockfeller) or shifting costs (ala WalMart and GE) has a storied history in the “building” of our country. This is not the world that I want to live in, but I do and I sure am having fun as an observer.

Mike

Perhaps someone like Attorney Silvers knows he will be caught one day, but, in the meantime, the business he will have built will make getting banned ‘indefinitely’ worth it?

I just re-read the above sentence and I can hardly believe any gain would be great enough to risk such a penalty.

But…what if you made millions before being caught?

Hmm…the shady life of spammers. Not something I know anything about, really. What makes it worth it?
Miriam

Not sure I understand your point…could you clarify? Who is Mike Jones? When you say it is still in effect..does that mean that Google has blessed it or hasn’t blessed the practice? When you say “But obviously the other tactics are” would you elucidate which tactics and as to what they are?

Mike

re: But here is where my question lies….. is it spam because of the keyword stuffing, or because of the locations that obviously weren’t physical locations.

In this case (Michael Silvers) they are actual physical locations, just a few too many listings at each and stuffed with keywords…in the panzermike case I think he probably did both + non existent locations.

In my book it is spam because he is creating 6 (or more) map listings for each actual location. But ultimately it isn’t my opinion of what is spam but Google’s….and we only know that after the fact.

Mike

But here is where my question lies….. is it spam because of the keyword stuffing, or because of the locations that obviously weren’t physical locations.

I kind of laughed at that when I saw the onebox….. the trick to get the authoritative onebox is to trick the engine to think the query is actually for a business and not a general search. So they obviously used the title tag and then we know from the patent review of that the local algorithm looks at the URL and analyzes the landing page submitted with that listing and likes to see the business name in the domain name. S when this guy submitted the url “www.dogbiteattorneys.biz” that was enough for Google to assume that was a business name and not a keyword search.

Obviously this brings up the fact again of the huge need for an algorithm that determines servicing in separate cities and ranking on that factor.

I don’t know about you but this all is so 1999 all over agin again……..

I can see validity in using the UPS location here for the purpose of marketing, it was the main reason for getting that mailbox in the 1st place, to give a physical presence.

However,

I would be disappointed to see 2 separate locations for his business. He should use his UPS address in this case and list his additional location using a custom field or something of the like.

It also depends on what address(es) he lists on his website. They should match your listing.