Comments on: The Local File – Google Local Business Hijacking Issues

By: Easyaccountancy

Easyaccountancy — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 16:27:27 +0000

Hi there,

I’ve had many issues with Google places and local business being hijakced, the thing is Google don’t review the businesses well enough. Almost anyone can get a postcard or phone verification to create a listing. Personally I think Google need to clamp down on this

By: gadgets

gadgets — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 04:10:14 +0000

All I can say is this is fubar. I’ve also had problems with competitor leaving bogus negative reviews on competitors maps listings.

By: Nat

Nat — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 13:25:02 +0000

@ freelance seo manchester, can I kindly ask how you managed to do it. I’ve followed the instructions above and verified by phone etc but a week later the pesty advertisement is still there! Would love to hear from you or anyone, Thanks

By: freelance seo manchester

freelance seo manchester — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 11:41:15 +0000

I had the same problem a few months ago, the customer wasn’t happy at all – but i managed to get it sorted!

By: Nat

Nat — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 14:21:07 +0000

Its just happened to me after 2 years of service. I picked it up after 10 minutes of it happening, not by plan or sophisticated alert system either, just pure plain luck! The dude who’s done it is actually a serial pest, I did notice his business name come up a few times on others listings …. guess it was only a matter of time he came a knocking on my door. Its late night over here, will ‘try’ to contact someone alive/non-alive at the folks at google to advise what they will do about the ‘pest-e’ problem.

By: Shane

Shane — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 14:24:37 +0000

Couldn’t the client just cancel the affiliates account – making it “free” traffic for them?

Saying that – I’ve printed your guide on how to fix it incase I need it in the future. Hopefully Google will sort it before that happens though!

By: Dannie Waisath

Dannie Waisath — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 14:25:07 +0000

i loved Zulema Cavett comment

By: David

David — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:56:07 +0000

actually I have gotten a phone call from google to verify a listing. I have also gotten a sales call from google in order to help me start an adwords campaign. Did you know that accordingto another blog on the web less than 10% of businesses have claimed their business on google maps? My point is that companies gve away free things at a price that is not necessarily a Financial one. In this situation google could be giving away this free service in order to attract more businesses to use google for financial gain, and in the process expanding the web and creating an untapped source of Adwords spenders. I currently do not have an adwords account and google would have never known to call me unless I opened my place page.

By: James

James — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 14:40:59 +0000

Put yourself in Google’s shoes, it’s a free service that they aren’t making any money out of so why should they pay teams of people to manage the listings. It’s all a game and the one who understands it for long enough, wins.

Download anything that’s free on the net and it will probably have bugs, download something you have paid for and it will work fine. If it doesn’t then they will have a team to support you. This is no different.

I know it’s not perfect and it’s frustrating at times but I get zero access to Yahoo local listings (unless I pay for them) and I still don’t know if Bing is beginning to list local places as there data never moves!

By: David

David — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 19:47:34 +0000

I think that google knew in advance that their would be some issues with local search that they would need to solve. Therefore, I postulate the following and welcome all those to agree or disagree.

Google’s logic is – “hey we need to get in on this local search game but if we wait to long, we might lose out…but wait a minute, there are all of these issues that spammers would do which we don’t know how to fix….in addition, there might be issues which we can never even imagine would come up….lets release a preliminary version to see what people can come up with….lets create a melting pot of spammers to find out who and how people are taking advantage, and then we will rebuild our local search with all of the issues fixed.”

I think that google experiments with its users much more than we think. This 7 box system can be one big experiment to see what potential issues can arise in order to create a better second version.

Thanks,
D