Last week we wrote how Yahoo Local was full of affiliate spam (additional information can be found on Search Engine Land and Understanding Google Maps & Yahoo Local Search. Until recently, they were the only Local of the big three to allow any user to edit listing information without verification.
This morning, I stumbled across two articles by Techdirt and TechCrunch praising the move by Google to open up wiki style editing to the maps. While I generally agree that this is a cool feature, there are some hard lessons to be learned from Yahoo. Some of the comments on these stories talk about the opportunities for "vandals" to mess with the listings, but they miss the real problem. Local affiliate spam involves editing links to include an affiliate code, so even though the link still lands users on the same page, all actions taken by those visitors are credited to the affiliate.Affiliate spammers aren’t one-off angry people or kids goofing off, they have a direct financial interest in changing as many listings as possible, they will keep coming back again and again, and they usually send the traffic to the correct end result, so most users don’t even notice the difference.
This last point is something that severely weakens the power of wiki style collaboration. The average user, the guy that would notice and fix a link pointing somewhere completely inappropriate, probably won’t know that this is an affiliate link, and once they land on the correct page, probably won’t think much of the odd link url.
One thing Google does right is allowing business owners to verify by phone or mail, blocking out user edits upon verification. A quick search on Google appears to show that the verified (and Google generated) results come up by default and the user generated content is one of the extra options. This extra layer is great, sort of a "user be warned".
In the couple searches I did, I didn’t find any of the the Commission Junction or Converseon redirects used to spam Yahoo. For now, they appear to be resigned to the "user generated" category, but they are there and if Google isn’t careful about how they integrate these results, bad things may be on the way.
An interesting point about this screenshot: all of the Yahoo results we were looking at used the affiliate #2005797, in the Google results, it appears to be much more varied. Almost as if #2005797 was testing the waters and decided it wasn’t worth going all out just yet.
As Cavan mentioned in the Yahoo post, the more insidious results are when Yahoo displays the map results in a regular web search (and hides the affiliate link behind "official website"). I can’t find any instance of this happening on Google yet, but as but as the local results are being pulled more often into regular searches, it seems like it is only a matter of time. I can’t imagine Google implementing this feature and not linking it up to other services.
A Strange Occurrence
As an aside to the main story, during my searches, I noticed something really strange in New York City local searches. One of the first searches I did was for marriott, in New York, NY.
uppereast.com appears to be nothing more than a crappy city guide website linked to an ian affiliate program. A quick whois confirms that they are not Marriott owned. The really weird part is that they are showing up as the VERIFIED owner. It didn’t take long before I realized that they were showing on MOST of these listings. What happens if I do a search for that domain?
5,488 resuts!! Not just hotels, but restaurants and parking garages, it looks like they have half the city on lockdown. Don’t get me wrong, I am not opposed to this type of site in general, if someone can get traffic and make money from referrals, more power to them, but, in this case, it certainly seems like something more shady is happening. I would absolutely LOVE it if anyone knows how and why this happened.
R.E. the weird url assignment
If the owner has not claimed a record, as in the Mariott case, Google will assign a url. This forced choice of url’s can range from the sublime to the ridiculous but is based on their best guess as to authoritative website.
See Google’s forced choice for the Authoritative Website and you can learn more about it.
Once the owner claims the site then it will go away. What is interesting in this case is that even though the owner has not claimed the record, google has not opened the record up for public editing.
Mike
Mike
What you are seeing with the Blue Pin is not viewer edited records but MyMaps created records. This is in fact a different layer. Google is accumulationg kml, georss files and user created MyMaps to build this data (see this post) Generally they do not compete with business listings. These are different than a user edited record.
When an unclaimed business record is edited it will show the same red pin but a small notation below in blue that says “Edited”.
Mike
R.E. the weird url assignment
I understand what you are saying here. Why wouldn’t Google have an edit button if it hasn’t been claimed though? Take this search
Pin J has the correct website, but it also has an edit button. Pin I has uppereast, but no edit button (which I always assumed meant it was claimed). If what you are saying is correct (and I don’t doubt it), that is some wackiness on Google’s part. How do they even decide if a listing gets a edit button or not?
I see what you are saying about the Blue Pins, I will see if I can find some affiliate Red Pins.
Thanks for the clarifications.
Ben
It appears that Google is attempting to prevent the same sort of abuse that is dogging Yahoo….
Mike