Title Spam | The Fake Review | Reporting Steps | What Can Google Do? | Why all this now?
Google’s Universal Search is the giant’s response to address the changing nature in user search habits and maintain a diversity of results that keeps Google at the cutting edge of information delivery. Users can expect to find, along with the traditional results served up, excerpts from news, videos, maps, as well as financial data like stocks and shares. That’s one page of results and multiple sources and directions for the user to go in. A much better search experience, but Google is no longer alone.
The recent launch of Microsoft’s Search Engine Bing, while not amounting to much in terms of overall search engine market share, is for the first time in many years, offering Internet users an alternative to Google, where results diversity, and a flexibility of its search results mean that a user can filter results using an intuitive and straightforward process (no more Boolean logic operators such as “and” “‘-” “+”) and get excellent answers.
The focus of this post is on one element of the fruits of Google’s Universal Search output, affectionately referred to by experts in the field, as the Google 10 pack – for everyone else: the 10 listings that show up next to the Google map excerpt on first page of search results.
Google Maps is unsurprisingly, a great driver of traffic. Although no studies have yet been conducted to confirm this, based on research we can infer that users place a high degree of trust in these results because the internet is a bit of a wilderness for most users, who are unsure that the website they are interacting with who and what it claims to be. The link of a business and the Google map adds more authenticity to the listing, because the perception that the business is miles away, in an unknown place, is brought visibly nearer. Therefore Google map results, despite their potential for containing erroneous data, help reconcile this fear for the user. But if the map data is not 100% accurate for reasons of a technical nature, human error or manipulation (as will be shown), should Google consider placing a disclaimer on its 10 pack listings, in the same way that Trip Advisor has done with regards to its user generated content?
“Message from TripAdvisor: TripAdvisor has reasonable cause to believe that either this property or individuals associated with the property may have attempted to manipulate our popularity index by interfering with the unbiased nature of our reviews. Please take this into consideration when researching your travel plans.”
The placement of businesses in the Google 10 pack is driven by a number of factors that and David and his collaborators have done a fantastic job documenting. For the sake of simplicity, and not to undo the extensive work that goes into compiling ranking factors checklist, it can broadly be whittled down to the following: include your keywords in the business description, select categories that match with the business being submitted, and reinforce your listing by adding location based data to your website (such as a KMZ/KML file to your contacts page, and address data on each page). This makes perfect sense, and actually goes someway to authenticating better the website in the eyes of the first time visitor suffering from the “who are you” complex.
However, there have been a lot of problems with Google Local Business, while spammers are clogging up Google with listings that are manipulating an algorithm that is overloaded. Here are the fruits of our observations of Google Local listings.
The Title Spam
According to Google Local Business listings quality guidelines “Do not attempt to manipulate search results by adding extraneous keywords into the title field, and do not include phone numbers or URLs in the title along with your proper business name.” So, if your business trading name is “xdkfleowqq shoes”, the name you use in your Local business listings should be “xdkfleowqq shoes”.
What the business name should not be is “best shoes and cheap shoes in [insert city]“. But that’s what’s happening at the moment. So you might ask the question, “hold on, why doesn’t Google just check the domain name against the business name? and overwrite the field accordingly?”. Well, in some cases a business name and the name used online are different (for example, where the domain name might have already been registered by someone else with a business, or a marketing strategy edict places all the company activity under a differently named domain ). Due to this situation, Title spam can, and does rule across the directory.
The Fake Review
First a bit of background…Google arrived late to the Social Media Table, and has been making moves to have user generated assets (reviews, photos, video) as part of it’s portfolio.
Currently, for each business in Google Local, user generated reviews are aggregated using a range of different websites. This is most evident in the Travel and Tourism sector [just keyword hotel + city and pres the reviews button next to the Google Map listing to see the aggregated sources]. But what spammers have noted is that if a business listing is created using a good peppering of keywords, (such as in the Title and Description of the business listing) and this is complimented with user reviews by Google email account holders, it is possible to land some significant positions in Google right at the top of the listings.
We”ve seen cases of affiliate websites that with 30+ reviews are able to position themselves at the top of Google, with just their business listed next to a map. If these same affiliates were buying these keywords using Adwords, each click would cost them upwards of $3.00, that’s even before we factor in Google’s quality score. Do the math, the cost of getting to position 1 in Google is 30+ Gmail accounts, 30 reviews against the business website address.
The fake review is powerful, and thankfully clear actions are being taken in other areas of the web where this unethical practice is identified and the necessary steps are being taken.
Reporting Steps
- Register your business with Google Local – If you have a business and you haven’t registered yet, you should (someone might already be camping on your street address online). At the moment one of the requirements for registering your business is that your official business telephone number is within reach of a computer, this, so that you can enter the validation code into your Google account.
- Place a spam report with Google – The standard mechanism for reporting any problems with the listings in Google.
- Post a question in Webmaster Help – register a Gmail account and you can then post your concern in Google’s webmaster help section.
- Write a report in the Google Maps thread – According to the thread you will need to provide the search term, a link to the search result, and a short description of why you consider the listing to be spam.
something positive?
Google is and will continue to give preference to reviews submitted by it’s Gmail account users. It makes sense to promote its own assets. That means that customers with Gmail accounts can be powerful allies in your success online. Write to them (not all at once, you might set off a filter!) and ask them to write a short review (if an incentive were offered to the customer, such as a discount on a future purchase, it would be classified a paid review).
For the more technical minded (and for those businesses already appearing in the Google 10 pack) go to Google.com, and logout of any Google related services. Then find your business [usually company name + city + country will bring it up] and click on the tab that is displayed ( usually “more information” or “reviews“). On the subsequent page, copy the link “write a review” into a text file (the link, not the text!). Then go to one of the URL shortening services such as Tinyurl and use the copied URL to create a shorter version that won’t come unstuck if you send it by email or post it online. You can then add this link to the footer of your invoices, signature file, or use it in follow up communications with customers. Think of this as an internet version of “how’s my driving” seen on the back of lorries.
For the even more technical minded, a 302 redirect and htaccess can be combined so that the short URL still contains your domain name.
What can Google do to address the problem?
Some suggestions for making Google maps a better place.
- Remove the star rating that a user can apply to a review. One to five might work fine for a survey, but it is too great a scale for what is being asked – frankly if someone is going to sit down at their computer and write a review for a business, they are going to be writing a great one, or a really bad one. That could be a distinction for organizing the reviews, but we think the best strategy is to let the content of the review explain to a reader whether the experience was good or bad, and then Google should parse the data for mood words to automatically categorize the review under the headings of good or bad, giving a user the ability to remove false positives.
- Scan all Gmail accounts under which a review has been created, and then remove those reviews (not accounts) where the email address has shown no activity except for review writing.
- To help flag algorhythmically the worst offenders, scan all the Google reviews looking for positive keywords (good, excellent, amazing), that have 5 stars or more, and have keywords drawn from the biggest traffic driving keywords (the top 100) for the sector the business is operating in (as defined by the category the business selects for itself when creating a profile).
- IP checking of identified “hot” accounts could provide a useful further check, even if this method can be circumvented using an anonymous proxy.
The importance of Google in the search market is inescapeable. This post identifies a risk to consumers that may be taking decisions online relating to a business, based on information that might be false due to spamming, or incorrect due to human error or because of shortfalls in the current technology regarding the merging of multiple data sources.
Equally, as other commentators have noted, the process of business authentication in Google local is problematic and not straightforward, thus limiting the ability of business to take corrective steps to update their business information profile, thus allowing the unethical practice of fake business registrations to continue longer than necessary.
We hope that steps can taken to ensure that consumers and businesses are protected online from some of the points covered in this post.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
> Remove the star rating.
Its odd how making it a two star rating (go/no go) leads to a more accurate rating. Then allowing the for top rated comments to climb to the top.
Thanks for your comment, a two star rating (good/bad) would at least limit the ability of the star ratings to be seen by spammers as potential factors to influence the impact the review has on its position. The point being made is that the review should explain whether something was good or bad and any the actual experience of the user should be possible to identify via keywords/moodwords. Is that what you mean?