I performed the same analysis today, and the results have improved greatly:

This is a significant improvement. The percentage of spammy listings has been cut almost in half, while the percentage of local companies listed has increased by a factor of 1.79.

In addition, I did not find a single duplicate listing, whereas three months ago six of the listings were duplicates within the same geography.

Even not including the spamming, this is a tough, in-fighting industry. There were many instances of negative reviews seemingly written by competitors and positive reviews likely written by the company itself.

And three of the listings included reviews from competitors stating that such-and-such company was not licensed (in those cases, I couldn’t find any evidence that the companies in question was licensed, so it might be wise to stay away).

Even if you think this is Google’s responsibility to police, it’s going to be difficult to clean up. It certainly makes accurately evaluating locksmiths rather difficult, however.

By city, here are the number of spam listings:

• Austin: 1 spam, 6 non-spam
• Dallas: 2 spam, 5 non-spam
• El Paso: 0 spam, 6 non-spam, 1 off-target
• Fort Worth: 5 spam, 2 non-spam
• Houston: 1 spam, 5 non-spam, 1 borderline
• San Antonio: 6 spam, 1 non-spam

San Antonio takes the title from Fort Worth as the spammiest city in Texas (for “locksmith” keywords, at least).

There’s still room for improvement, but I need to give Google credit. They’ve made significant improvement. The number of misleading business listings within Google Maps seems to be declining.

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.

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.