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Google Maps Still Spammed for Locksmiths

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.

Anatomy of the Implied Local SERP

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.

Importance of Ranking on Google Maps

I was asked yesterday how important ranking is within the Google 10-Pack, assuming you’re listed on the first page. I’d like to share my thoughts here.

Google has not published any statistics on the difference that one’s placement in the local rankings makes, but this is not surprising with a beta service. Local listings are one of the primary battlegrounds between Google, Yahoo, and Bing and they’re all keeping their data very close to the vest.

Still, there’s definitely an analog to traditional rankings. The higher up you are, the more traffic your bound to get, all else equal.

The analog is not perfect, however, as local and organic don’t lay out in the same way on the page. For instance, the tenth organic listing is at the very bottom of the page (e.g. below the fold), while the tenth local listing is still at the top of the page.

In addition, the presence of review data on listings can certainly skew the CTR to be different than the ordering might suggest. A listing with a top ranking but low average reviews might not get the clicks it would otherwise receive.

None the less, being first in the local listings is certainly much better than being tenth.

What to do With that Negative Review

It can happen to the best of companies. You’ve worked hard to get your company to come up on Google Maps for your most important keywords. And just when you get your listing to the first page, someone hits you with a negative review.

What do you do now?

First of all, take a deep breath. All indications are that the quantity of reviews is much more important to the Google Maps algorithm than the quality of those reviews. Oddly enough, that negative review might actually help your rankings.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t help with the click through rate of those rankings. The negative review reflects badly on your company, especially if it is one of a handful of reviews (or worse, the only review).

Don’t give into the dark side and write a positive review of yourself (or ask your employees to do so). People really can sniff those things out without much effort, and it makes your company look all the worse.

Perhaps given enough time you could come up with self-written reviews that would pass the “sniff” test, but wouldn’t that effort be better spent on getting legitimate reviews?

Instead, ask your customers to post reviews of your company to Google Maps (or one of the databases that feeds into it). If you’ve been taking care of them, many will be happy to do it.

Next, let’s go back to the negative review itself. Those that write negative reviews online tend to fit into one of three buckets:

1. Those with completely legitimate concerns.
2. Those with concerns you don’t completely agree with, but who aren’t entirely unreasonable.
3. Those who are emotionally unbalanced in some way.

For the first group, the response is simple: fix their bloody problem. If you can’t figure out who exactly the customer is, make sure the next guy doesn’t have the same problem.

If you can’t fix the problem, you probably deserve the negative review (and the additional ones you’re likely going to receive).

The third group is a bit harder. If the reviewer is truly unhinged, engaging with him or her isn’t likely to do you any good.

I’ve got one client who received what he believed was an unreasonable review on Google Maps. I looked at the other reviews this guy had written, and of some thirty reviews, only two were even vaguely positive. All the rest were brutally negative. This didn’t seem to be a healthy person. Attempting to engage wasn’t going to help in any way.

In these cases, the best thing to do is almost always to walk away. However, if the review is truly defaming, and you can determine who posted it, you might explore legal action.

Disclosure: I am not a lawyer. What little I know about the legal matters I got from watching Law & Order and John Grisham movies. Those who actually follow what I say without gaining advice from qualified legal counsel deserves what happens to them.

You’re unlikely to receive any help from Google with the negative review. The concept of common carrier means Google actually exposes itself to more liability if it censors such things.

On the other hand, you could take legal action with the reviewer himself. If the reviewer made false claims of fact (that can’t be ascribed to opinion) a defamation case could perhaps be made.

Be aware that this route is expensive, could result in additional negative publicity, and could fail outright. Even if you win, the best that is likely to happen is that the review is taken down. People who behave like this tend to be judgment proof.

You are probably better off just moving on to the next customer, and making sure you give them outstanding service.

Note: I put false reviews by competitors into this third bucket as well. While you could potentially take a legal course, proving that a competitor posted the review is likely to be tough. You’re better off ignoring it and working to make sure you have lots of positive reviews.

The middle group can be the hardest. While you don’t think their review was fair, it’s not without merit. First of all, attempt to look at the situation without emotion. You may learn that there is more merit than you initially think.

For instance, even a case of improper expectations boils down to a mistake by your company, if those expectations were not set properly.

If you can determine who the reviewer is, attempting to engage may be worthwhile. In many cases, simply allowing the complaint to be heard may do a lot to smooth things over. You also may learn how to serve your customers better.

What’s almost always the case is that engaging with the situation is better than ignoring it.

In summary, your best defense against a negative review is to have lots of legitimate positive reviews. But when that negative review comes, don’t be afraid to engage with the review and fix the problem.

Google Cracking Down on Map Spam

For some time now, Google Maps has been rife with spam for locksmith-related keywords. Lead aggregators, whether companies or individuals, submit Local Business Listings for geographies all over the country. They often use fraudulent methods to push their own listings to the top of the Google Map results, and many times create multiple listings for the same aggregator within the same geography.

If fortunate, the people that call these services have a licensed, capable locksmith show up to help them.

If not so fortunate, the “locksmith” that shows up might be neither licensed nor capable. There are countless stories of the quoted cost suddenly going up once the person arrives. There are also reports of rip-offs and thefts.

Certainly, all industries have their share of scam artists. But for locksmith-related keywords, it’s often been difficult to find one legitimate practitioner within the Google 10-pack.

That has now finally started to change.

The blog “Understanding Google Maps & Local Search” reports that Google is beginning to crack down on Google Map spam, especially within the locksmith industry.

This is good news, although indications are that Google still has more work to do. Many spammy listings remain. In some cases, they still entail the bulk of the listings on a particular query.

There are also reports of seemingly innocent parties being caught in the crossfire, simply for having a particular term in their LBL. This is a clumsy approach on Google’s part, and I expect that it will be adjusted over time.

It should serve as a reminder, however, that with most things SEO:

Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered

If you’re in a competitive industry, you’re going to want/need to push the envelope to get the rankings for your company. But you should realize that the harder you push, the more likely you are to get smacked by Google. You don’t want that.

And don’t forget that there’s a difference between optimization and deception. The latter will tend to bring you unwanted attention.

Lastly, you should never rely on only a single marketing channel. Any marketing channel can disappear with little to no warning, especially one as in continuous state of flux like Google Maps. If Google Maps is your only marketing channel, and Google changes their algorithm in the wrong way for you, you may find your business heading in a bad direction very quickly.

And, last I checked, Washington wasn’t writing bail-out checks for local businesses.