Ahmed of iBegin has just written an insightful piece about fighting local spam in response to the recent articles that have appeared , SearchEngineland, eClick, Small Business SEM and here about affiliate spam at Yahoo. He sites some interesting statistics that only 1/2 of 1% of all user edits are malicious. However the impact of these motivated few can be widespread.

In his post he details types of local spam, techniques for coping with it and defines some of the gray areas that exist. It starts an important first step for the Local industry: self analysis, questioning and conversation that really needs to take place amongst the industry leaders.

From where I sit these these questions and more need to be asked:

•What is mapspam?
•What is a reasonable approach to to the varying forms of it?
•How do we respond to it?.
•What are the technical and human limits to these efforts?
•Which technologies and investments are critical?
•What types of forward facing reporting mechanisms do we need?

It really is an “industry issue” that if it is not dealt with by the industry will rise to the level of new laws at local, county and state levels that will be much more onerous than the most strict of internal policing.