Google Should Use “Common Sense” To Detect Local Map Spam

Posted by Will Gallahue on Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011 in Local Search

I noticed something unsettling today after search for the phrase “dentist in San Antonio”

Take a look at the following picture and you’ll see what I mean. The top result for this term is a “phone service company.”

I decided to take a closer look at this listing and found some things that should have at least triggered some type of review:

- The categories are completely unrelated (Dentist, Cell Phone Store)
- 240 West Houston street doesn’t exist according to address searches
- The listing has a Dallas phone number and when you Google the phone number, you find that it has an interesting history
- While they can’t check with street view, it shows a Domino’s Pizza, a bar and some parking lots

- Was the strategy here: Find a fake address, have Google pull reviews from the closest resolving address and piggyback the reviews to rank?

To avoid these kinds of problems, Google should implement a relationship level where they assign a correlation coefficient to how well two industries relate (Dentist and Cosmetic Dentist = 1, Dentist and Cell Phone Store = 0). In addition, Google should really look at matching area codes with business addresses as another ranking signal for local search.Tweet

Tags: google, local search, spam

This entry was posted by Will Gallahue on Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011 at 10:21 pm and is filed under Local Search . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.