ionadas local Blog

Two months ago, we discussed the abundance of spam listings in Google Maps for “locksmith” keywords. Indications at that time where that Google was attempting to crack down on these spammers, so I decided to take a look and see how they were coming along.

I looked at the listings for the six largest cities in Texas: Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso and Fort Worth. All have populations north of half a million people.

For each of these, I searched on the city name plus “locksmith”. So, for Houston, I searched on [houston locksmith]. For each Google Maps listing returned on the standard Google results page, I recorded:

• Display Name
• Display URL
• Phone Number
• Actual Name from Site Returned when the Listing is Clicked
• Actual URL from Site Returned when the Listing is Clicked

In addition, I recorded several subjective judgments for each listing and whether the site had duplicate listings within the same query.

All told, I looked at 53 listings. All the queries returned a 10-pack of map listings, except for Houston, which returned a 3-pack. Given Houston’s status as the largest city in Texas and the fourth largest in the United States, it was surprising that only a 3-pack was returned. Perhaps this is a clumsy attempt at spam reduction by Google.

Subjective Factor One
Is the listing for a local company?

Many (most?) of the companies advertising in the locksmith industry do not employ any actual locksmiths. They are simply lead aggregators that collect your info and sell it to a locksmith in your area. Hopefully that locksmith sent out is licensed and trustworthy, but there is certainly no guarantee.

Unfortunately, only 35.85% of the listings surveyed actually reflected a local company. Nearly two out of three were clearly just pretending to be located in that geography.

Subjective Factor Two
Does the display name match the website name?

I was relatively liberal on declaring a match. If the company had added a keyword, but the actual company name was recognizable, it counted as a match. In addition, a keyword-only name that used the same keyword name on the website counted as a match.

Only 60.47% of the time did the names match. This is something that Google clearly needs to address, but it will be difficult to do so in an automated manner. And Google hates to do things by hand.

If the listing did not link to a website, it was not counted in this metric.

Subjective Factor Three
Does the display URL match the website URL?

One of the standard Google Maps spam tricks is to include a keyword URL in the display and have it redirect to your actual branded site. The hope is that the keyword URL would count as another instance of usage of the keyword.

Google does seem to be cracking down on this, as they matched 90.70% of the time. On the other hand, this should be very easy for Google to check. Simply have Googlebot crawl the link, and if there’s a redirect, shut them down. I’m not sure why Google is not taking a more aggressive stance on this obvious spam.

If the listing did not link to a website, it was not counted in this metric.

Subjective Factor Four
Is the listing name keyword spam?

This was an assessment of how much the name of the listing on Google Maps appears to be just keyword usage. 47.17% of the listings had names that were nothing but keyword spam.

Again, this is hard to police in an automated manner, but the accuracy of a listing’s name is critical to the integrity of the system.

Subjective Factor Five
Is the listing spam?

This was an assessment of whether the listing itself is spam. Over-usage of keywords and misrepresentation of location where the most common cause of a listing being judged as spam.

Unfortunately, 64.71% of the listings for “locksmith” in the six largest Texas cities are spam. In other words, barely a third of these listings can be trusted. This is an unacceptable quality level.

One company came up for both Austin and San Antonio. They appear to be a company licensed as a locksmith in Texas, although they are servicing multiple geographies. It’s not clear where they are actually located, however. I did not count them in the spam numbers as they are an unusual case.

Duplicate Listings
Six of the listings examined were duplicates within the same geography. In other words, the same company was taking up multiple listings within the same search. There was one match pair in Dallas and two matched pairs in Houston. This is another sort of spam that should be very easy for Google to detect.

By city, here are the number of spam listings:

• Austin: 7 spam, 2 non-spam, 1 unclear
• Dallas: 7 spam, 3 non-spam
• El Paso: 1 spam, 9 non-spam
• Fort Worth: 9 spam, 1 non-spam
• Houston: 2 spam, 1 non-spam
• San Antonio: 7 spam, 2 non-spam, 1 unclear

For the keyword “locksmith”, at least, cattletown Fort Worth has the most can pork by-product in the state of Texas. And El Paso has the cleanest listings.

Come see Brian Combs of ionadas local speak at Interactive Strategies 2009 in Houston on September 9, 2009. Brian will be speaking on SEO vs. PPC in the 3:10pm session.

Interactive Strategies 2009 is a full day conference sponsored by the Houston Interactive Marketing Association and includes tracks on Social Media, SEO, Creative and Strategy. The keynote is by Brian Solis, the principal of FutureWorks, a PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley.

Attendees can register online and receive a 15% discount by using the promotional code “bcombs”.

While 40% of searches contain explicit local intent, geographic intent can be inferred for countless more queries. For many of these queries, Google includes its Google Maps listings for the locality of the searcher automatically.

I was curious about the structure of Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) for queries that imply local intent, so I spent part of yesterday studying them.

Methodology
To build a profile of implied local SERPs, I looked at over one hundred such queries and recorded pertinent information such as where the map was listed, what sort of map was listed (10-page versus 3-pack), and whether any other vertical search results were ranked above the map.

Only two of the queries were three words long. The rest were almost evenly split between one word and two words queries.

All queries were performed on August 18, 2009 and were made on a Time Warner Cable internet connection in Cedar Park, Texas. Geolocation services consistently resolve this connection as being in Austin, Texas. Screenshots of the SERP were recorded for each query. They were also taken for the query plus “austin”, so that comparisons could be made.

For an example of an implied local SERP, see this screenshot taken for [grocery store].

Findings
The natural location of the Google Maps listing on an implied local SERP is the fourth spot, but this can be pushed down by an additive vertical listing above it. In one case, the third organic listing had an indented listing after it, which pushed the Google Maps listing down to fifth. Otherwise, if there were no vertical listings above the Google Maps listing, it was always fourth.

There were four types of vertical listings that could be ranked above the Google Maps listing.

The distribution by rank of the Google Maps listing was as follows:

Placement in the 6th or 7th spot happened when two or three vertical search listing types out-ranked the Google Maps listing for a particular query.

The 10-pack was shown 92.38% of the time, while the 3-pack was shown 7.62%. Ie did not see the 1-pack on an implied local SERP.

For 12.38% of the time, Google placed the designation “Customized for Austin metro area, US” at the bottom of the SERP. This indicates that Google is blending pages that score for Austin within the organic listings. This is equivalent to adding “Austin” to the query for those organic listings. It did not change the ranking for the Google Maps listing.

In nearly all cases, the Google Maps listing on the implied local SERP was identical to the Google Maps listing on its companion explicitly local SERP. The only exceptions were the occasional authoritative 1-pack on the explicitly local SERP, which occurred when the company name matched the query exactly.

Implications
If a particular query returns an implied local SERP, that increases the importance of optimizing for its local variant within Google Maps. Google has not released and data on the ratio of traffic from queries with implied locality versus those with explicit locality, but it’s reasonable to assume it is non-trivial.

Implied locality greatly complicates things for national brands. Many of these companies are used to dominating the SERPs for their queries, and the addition of local listings across all localities (assumably) results in their having to fight hundreds of little battles. Most large companies are not structured to compete in this manner.

Concordantly, it’s a great opportunity for the local business!

Open Question
One unanswered question is how implied local SERPs differ by the location of the searcher. I’m especially interested in comparing whether a 10-pack or a 3-pack is returned. Is the selection driven by the nature of the query itself, or the nature of the local listings for a particular geography?

If anyone is interested in helping me by performing some queries (and taking screen shots) in other cites, please let me know.

SXSW Interactive 2010 may be seven months away, but part of it is heating up already: the “Panel Picker” has just launched. This is a website that allows you to have a voice on the topics for SXSW Interactive, by voting them up or down, and commenting on them.

Brian Combs of ionadas local is in the running this year, with this topic:

(Simple + Searchable) x (WordPress Websites) = Results

This session will explore how to use the blogging application WordPress as a platform for a company website. This approach is idea for a small business, as it allows a company to have a professional web presence without spending thousands of dollars. It takes advantage of the thousands of available WordPress themes, most of which are free. Even the expensive themes are generally under $100.

Best of all, if you want to have a custom look and feel designed for you later, it can be built around the WordPress platform, so that all your content is already loaded.

If this session is going to happen, however, we need your help. Please vote for Brian’s session at the SXSW Interactive Panel Picker.

Vote early. Vote often!

The local listing service from Google is a buggy system. It’s not unusual for a change (or new listing) to be submitted, to show that it was accepted, and then to have disappeared when you check a few days later. It’s the nature of the beast, and rechecking your work is part of the process.

Things have gotten much worse in the last week or so. A number of changes I’ve submitted via the Local Business Center are not being reflected within Google Maps. They do seem to be saved within the LBC, but are not being transferred over to the public listing itself.

This is reflected by a number of comments at the Google Maps Help site. So far, no official comment from Google about the problem.

ionadas local will continue to monitor the listings of its clients very closely while all this is going on.

Hat Tip to SEO Roundtable for the link.