I read the other day in I, Cringely’s Blog that Google had a booth last month at the Online Lenders Association convention in Chicago, a group mostly composed of Payday lenders… you know the ones… they charge ~400% to help poor folks get from one pay check to a smaller one. What Google was doing at their convention I have no idea. This is legal part of American society for which I have little sympathy and less respect.

The article, however, about Google’s involvment reminded me that I had written extensively about spamming techniques in the Payday Loan industry as far back as as 2007. I did a quick search on Google for Cash Advance NY NY and the first result struck a bell for me and seemed oddly familiar. I did similar searches in Buffalo and a few other cities and saw much the same…

While Google’s effort at fighting spam might be criticized, their ability to search and sort my back library is near faultless. It turns out that I had written about this very company in a December, 2007 Searchengineland article titled: MapSpammers Getting More Sophisticated. In the article I detailed their techniques having used the exact same search & company as the example spam. At the time I included a screen shot of the Local results showing their #1 standing.  I noted:

The basics of the plan are simple (as originally described at oooff.com):

• Rent a mailing address with forwarding in every major market near the centroid of the city (UPS is one of many that offer this service)
• Obtain a domain name for each city with a relevant “location + service” domain
• Create a website that returns an optimized “location + service” page for the domain
• Enter the businesses in the Google Local Business Center (if you are doing the top 50 metro markets, not such a big deal) note: skip this and the next step if using Yahoo Local
• Enter the PIN numbers when they are forwarded to you
• Get rich quick

The folks at Google have mentioned on several occasions that they frequently allow spam into the Maps index so that it can be used to train and inoculate the system against future spam as they use it to increase their understanding of it. That may be so but leaving this crap in the system to display so prominently actively puts Google in the middle of a vicious cycle of exploitation.

With babies these days, there is a great deal of research that indicates that allowing them to actively play in the dirt is good for them and inoculates their system against a host of potential ailments and creates a dynamic with the bacteria that leads to increased happiness. But at the end of the day, a good parent still brings them inside and washes them off.

Google should take the lesson to heart. In the three years since this exact problem was reported, their baby, the Maps index, has started to grow up and deserves a decent bath.

(To see what Google sees at 118 Fulton St. NY NY)…