To ChrisR’s point, props to Andrew for being so patient with the rep. I’m curious what the hang-up rate is for these calls. Thank you Andrew and Mike for sharing this!

I received a similar call last week from Google verifying my address, and asking whether I received customers at my address (I don’t). The address has always been set to “do not display” in Places, but for some reason it began showing up in my Places listing about 2 weeks ago. I sent a note to support notifying Google that the address was showing, and asking them to remove, and I suspect that triggered the call.

The interesting point is my rankings took a significant hit after the call. It seems tied to removing the address from being displayed, but I was ranking quite well even when the address wasn’t displayed.

All very vexing. The quality of the call was also sub-standard. I can only imagine what the SMB owner goes through.

Fast forward to about 4:10 of that call. The Google maps rep finally states she is trying to amend the pin placement as it may be confusing for customers. Wow, what a great starting point that would have been. By the time she gets around to the point of her call most SMB reps would have hung up already.

@ChrisR : yes, to be hunged by Chris is all our hop..:)

thx for this article

@Mike: What are the purpose of these calls? If it’s spam, the last thing you do is call the business in question, since most spammers are better rehearsed than the Googlers (everyone is following a script), and almost all the spammers employ VOIP numbers that forward to another location. If it’s to verify the details of the address, why can’t they do that using their existing tools (street view, satellite view, Google reverse search)? If it’s to see if it’s a SAB with a street address, going through their website, SV, and satellite imagery should be enough info. to figure that out. I’m really puzzled by their internal procedures for verifying businesses, which seem unnecessary complicated and obtuse.

@Mike: I’ve just never had much success in removing spammy listings via Community Edits, even if they clearly violate Google Places Quality Guidelines, and even if I provide substantial evidence of their spamminess (and this is almost exclusively for locksmiths). There’s a lot of internal resistance at Google Place to removing any spammy POIs, even though they end up diluting the quality of Maps and make it harder for legit listings to compete. If you can’t trust the integrity of Maps, that’s the start of the ‘Everyone is cheating, so I have to cheap to survive’ mentality.

There’s a simple way to find call centers–if the business address is located at a 7-11, chances are the ‘business’ is not next to the Slurpee machine in the back. I could elaborate more, but there are ways of calling and catching the spammers at call centers, some through web-based searches, some through calling techniques. You have to have a bit of guile to do that.

Incidentally, their algo based flags don’t work (it seem incapable of registering simple typos and special characters, for example), and the Google Listing Editors responsible for reviewing the community edits are unfamiliar with the Google Places Quality Guidelines, to the point of absurdity. (Note to Google: Locksmith–just that, nothing else–is not a legitimate business name. You can safely add that one to your algos and internal review processes.)