Local Search Updates - Yahoo and Google

Yahoo Local

A few weeks ago, we reported that Yahoo Local was being filled with affiliate spam. This story was immediately picked up and expanded upon (most notably by Search Engine Land and Understanding Google Maps & Yahoo Local Search).

Shortly after, Small Business SEM had an interview with Brian Gil, Director of Product Management for Yahoo! Local who basically said that the “hotel thing” was really insignificant and most likely put in place by the hotel owners as a tracking mechanism.

In fact, a lot of businesses like to use URLs that are redirects for tracking purposes. Whether or not that click-through is for an affiliate tracker to use to get paid is a bit that’s in question, I would say.

Which is weird because big hotel chains like Marriott and Hilton have much better means to track clicks than paying a CJ affiliate fee (I guess folks at Yahoo haven’t heard of Google Analytics?). Not to mention, the reason why we found this in the first place was because of a client that most certainly didn’t want this. To top it off Mike Blumenthal dug up some nice stats which we expanded on showing that the “hotel thing” really was significant.

Recently, Mike noted that the map spam seems to be cleaned up (I wonder why they would spend time changing this when it wasn’t a problem to begin with). I ran a couple searches in NY and Chicago and didn’t find any of the CJ links and only a couple hiltonlinks and linksynergy.

Google Maps

While Google Maps has managed to dodge the bulk of straight affiliate redirect spam, there has been a flurry of news recently suggesting they are having a couple problems of their own. First, Online Restaurant Marketing and Small Business SEM point out that Google appears to be using Yelp and Citysearch listings when no website exists. While this may not be optimal, it appears that (in these instances) Google is just making a best guess with nothing else to go on. I noticed the same thing a while back with uppereast in NYC and recently with some searches for discoverourtown and some other very shady looking city affiliate sites. SEO by the Sea has a great in depth write up on incomplete and wrong data in Google Local.

Finally, Mike Blumenthal has a sort of funny and sort of sad story about a company making up addresses to get into local searches. It made me laugh because the company in question is comically bad, but it also made me sad because this is exactly the type of company that gives SEO a bad reputation and makes it hard to build trust with a client.

For the Future

In my view, the next hurdle for both Yahoo and Google to overcome in local search is how to deal with these city search guide sites. It is tricky, because in some cases (when no real website exists for a company) something like Yelp might be a good alternative, but there are plenty of cases where a real company site exists and the city search site overrides it. Is this just a mistake in the data, or is someone manipulating it? This is not nearly as clear cut as the CJ links were.