Over the past few weeks, there have been sightings of businesses not located in a respective city that show up in the local map 3-pack. A recent report by Search Engine Land, specifically states a situation where the search “Toronto SEO” showed three websites that used spam to be located in the top 5 five of the local pack. Out of the 23 local listings found in this report, 15 were spam and should not have been shown.
What Rules Are These Spammers Breaking?
Keyword stuffing: Your name used online should reflect your business’s real world name, which should also be the one used on your storefront and the one known by your customers. Adding unnecessary and spammed keywords is not permitted. This report found that all but one of the listings removed as spam were guilty of keyword stuffing.
Fake Address: Google requires that your physical location not be remote and that customers are allowed to make in-person visits there during your stated hours.
Multiple Listings: Google requires that you create only one page for each location of your address. The worst offender is when people create multiple listings in various suburbs of a city.
If you are in the SEO industry, everyone else that is following the rules politely asks you to stop. Boston Web Marketing, and successful SEO businesses understand that following the rules and working under what Google allows is the true road to success. A few days at the top of a search result may be fun, but what’s more fun is getting to the top of the search result page and staying there for the foreseeable future.
There are always people throughout the internet that are trying to make life difficult for SEO’s and internet users in general. Some of these cases include people spamming Google Analytic’s with incorrect data, and others spamming blog comments.