These guys even look truly local, as in you can go to the street view and find buildings with signs for their shops on them.  And they aren’t of the ilk who have 11,000 plus listings or even 1,100 plus listings.

All of that looked pretty positive and I thought that given the hammering that Google has been getting  in blogs from security to   local search experts they might actually be doing something different.  Then I looked at another city on the other side of the country and it turns out to be a fluke.  It’s impossible to say if Google is testing something with the NYC listings,  manually cleaned those up because of so much focus on that city or…. There are dozens of possible reasons for the results, but based on Portland’s 10-pack today one thing is sure, they’ve made no sweeping changes to clean up the problem.  And Davis Lock and Safe has fallen victim  to the spammers with a hijacked listing.   If you call the number in the 10-pack you get the spam company if you call the number on their Website 503-766-3814 you get a very pleasant employee.

Call most of these Portland listings and you’ll here one of the same three answers you hear across the country when you dial up a locksmith “Service” “Locksmith” “You’ve reached the mobile emergency line.”   When I called the one for DavisLocks.com as its listed in the local listings the guy had no idea where Beaverton (Davis is in Beaverton) was.  What was clear was that he had no connection to Davis but could based on a zip code send a locksmith out if I needed one.  Luckily I didn’t.  I then called the number off their Website and that’s when I spoke to the real company.

Portlanders beware.

Google, you have not solve the problem as you claim

Do a search on many major metropolitan areas around the country and you’ll find that when it comes to locksmiths Google’s local listings look like this screen shot. Here MiamiLockSmith.com has captured 3 of the 10 spots. AllTimeLockSmith.com has captured 2 and Locksmith-in-Miami.com has captured another 2. If you click on a Lock-Smith-in-Miami.com and surf down to the bottom of the page you’ll find links to, locksmith-in-new-york.com, locksmith-in-chicago.com, locksmith-in-las-vegas.com. It becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that these are all the same company, but it’s even more clear when you pick up the phone call the local numbers and they’re all answered by the same person that you’re not reaching a “local” company.

The results in Denver are similar with denverlocallocksmith.com having four of the local listings.  Althought the (303) 274-2233 listing is on their site the person who answers all of the numbers is the same.

Hijacked Google local listings is something Mike Blumenthal has reported on a number of times.  The issue is different but related to the one I’ve brought up above.  However what’s really troubling is how Google appears to be not addressing the issue.  In his March 10th post Mike drew a big old red arrow on a screen shot that shows 24x7locallocksmith.com hijacked a hotel listing.  Today while researching this post I looked at locksmith listings for NYC and guess what I found.

It’s the same URL as Mike pointed out i.e. same company.  According to Google Maps guide Jen in a comment on Mike’s blog they’ve fixed the problem.  To what extent have they fixed it?  In Mike’s post the company was claiming a hotel listing with 800 reviews now there are 65 for the Fairmont.  Apparently after Google fixed it this company was able to go right back out and perpetrate the same scam again.

So here’s my question,  why didn’t Google just boot 24x7locallocksmith.com from their index.  This is not a difficult manouver for them, so did they just not think of it?  Google has created a Map Spam form but what good is it if they aren’t going to use it to remove these kinds of listings completely.    That’s not to say I want them to get trigger happy, frankly their process for modifying and removing old listings when you replace them with new ones doesn’t always work that well and they could end up punishing innocent businesses, but in this case and in a lot of cases they have all the evidence to show that the spam is intentional and they should go ahead and boot the url from their index.
Map spam is so rampant, and certainly not just a locksmith problem that you have to wonder how much good a form is going to do.  If Google wants to get serious about the problem of single companies dominating the results, which in most cases translates to spam) for one local search querry what the above shows is that a good start would be to set up their algorithm so that no URL gets more than one spot.  Obviously attention has to be paid to subdomains as the miami.miamilocksmith.com land coral-gables.miami locksmith isting above shows, but they can work with this as well.  In the case of local listings consumer choice equals quality listings.

I have an insatiable curiosity for who my competitors are, so when I look at my Web site analytics and find I am showing up for a particular keyword phrase I often take a look at who I am sharing the space with.  This time what turned out to be most interesting about this endeavor were the Google Map results (you know the 10 that show up next to the map) versus the natural and adwords results.  Have a look.

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 What you should notice in the above is that with the exception of possibly travelportland.com none of them belong in that space.

And below are Google’s adwords ads demonstrating who would like to be in that space.

Wow – if the job of a search engine is to serve relevant results to searchers Google Map’s has a ways to go.