Recent reports of bulk upload Earthlink MapSpam may in fact be “spam” coming to Google from one of its “trusted” primary data suppliers instead rather than being entered via the Local Business Center. 

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. (image courtesy of ImNotaDoctor.com)

However upon further inspection of the records for both the Big Local and Earthlink spam, it appears that another scenario could be that the listings did not come via Google’s Bulk upload feature. A more likely explanation is that they were fed to Google via a primary data provider.

A normal record in Google has visible attributes that are typically associated with either a bulk upload or a single LBC entry. It is noted in the record that the information is provided by the business owner and the record does not support end user edits. In both of these cases neither condition was met. This leads me to supspect another route other than a bulk upload.

The questions might really be “which Google Data Provider has this level of trust and the inability to properly scrub their records?”