We were planning on saving this post for the launch of our new site and blog in April, but Greg Sterling’s article on Search Engine Land yesterday has prompted us to change our schedule. Google recently announced that they will allow anyone to edit the local listings in Google Maps, so long as that listing has not been claimed by a business owner. Greg touched on the possible negative implications of increased community involvement and included this statement:
Hanke acknowledged that there were some risks in doing this — Yahoo has had a similar system in place for some time without incident — but he stressed the value of getting the community involved in cleaning up and improving the database.
“Yahoo has had a similar system in place for some time without incident”…although it’s not clear whether this point was made by the author or Google Director of Maps & Earth, John Hanke, (it was Greg – thanks for the clarification) it would seem unwise to use Yahoo as proof of concept. Due to Yahoo’s open edit policy, Yahoo Local appears to be systematically sprinkled with affiliate spam. We first noticed this behavior doing research for a downtown Chicago hotel.
Read more →