Recent reports of bulk upload Earthlink MapSpam may in fact be “spam” coming to Google from one of its “trusted” primary data suppliers instead.
Last week and again today Imnotadoctor.com is reporting spammy listings in the Google Maps Local 10-Pack. In this most recent case the bad listings are from Earthlink. Stephen at Imnotadoctor.com speculates that this is a case of bulk upload abuse.
However upon further inspection of the records for both Big Local and Earthlink it appears that a more likely scenario that the listings did not come via Google’s Bulk upload feature. A more likely explanation is that they were fed to Google via whatever primary data provider that was being used.
The records in Google have attributes that are typically associated with either a bulk upload or a single LBC entry note in the record that the information is provided by the business owner and do not support end user edits:
The questions might really be “which Google Data Provider has this level of trust and the inability to properly scrub their records?”