It’s almost enough to make you throw your hands in the air and send out some postal mailer coupons again.
Google’s Local Business results are so bad, and so obnoxiously in the user’s face with the large color map right at the top, that I honestly feel that soon spamming these Local Business results will be the only way to compete. And would I be wrong to do so. I have a business and I have clients who need to at least be competitive and results like the ones I’ve copied below are really starting to not only become aggravating, but I believe hurt business.
10-Pack Spam
The above is just your run-of-the-mill Local Business result where a spammer (and most likely, an unaware spammer – meaning just someone who probably doesn’t even know spam from ham) figured out how easy it is to get multiple listings and did so. I reported this to Google on April 8, 2009, it’s June 13, 2009 at this posting.
I know that Google likes to do everything algorithmically, but I think it’s time that they get some recent college grad googlers in there and start straightening this out by hand.
Here’s another result:
Local business result spam
This one adds injury to insult with natural SERP spam as well. All those .info sites are the same company, but they were a little cleverer and bought a bunch of keyword-laden .info URLs and stuffed a Web page with keywords. Then they posted each as it’s own Local Business listing — some have the same phone number and different addresses, but that doesn’t seem to matter — and they have 11 spots on the first page — plus one (1) AdWords spot — that’s the icing on the cake, if these were real business, wouldn’t maybe more than one have an Adwords account?
The thing that’s so galling about this spam is that it’s so easily recognizable. It’s like competing against children on these things and because the ref won’t call a foul, the kids are dominating the court. I only recently reported this one, so I’m in for the long wait if I want to continue to let business slip by.
And plus, the multiple site thing doesn’t seem to bother the search engines… but that’s another article.
So I have to ask myself… is it worth waiting? Is it worth trying to abide by Google’s rules? I feel like I’m doing my clients and myself a disservice by waiting for this thing to get cleared out… and… what’s the repercussion going to be of a little cheating anyway? Some of my work gets omitted after time? But in the meantime, I have happy clients and generate some business.
I’ll have to make a decision, but from this post I hope two things:
1. That any SEOs that read this, recognize the futility, as I have, of playing by the rules and simply go the multiple listing route. Why? Because if the problem gets even more ridiculous than it is, than it will have to be addressed more quickly.
2. I hope against hope, that some googler whose unfortunate job it is to watch the Google Alerts for their company name, forwards this to the Local Business spam patrol and it hurries the fix.
Is this a difficult decision on how to proceed? I don’t think so. I know what I’m going to do… who’s with me…