expertSEM

Based on the buzz surrounding last week’s SMX West conference, Google believes it has eliminated the hijacking of claimed business listings on Google Maps. This is according to Jennifer Chin who has been a long standing member of the ever-reclusive maps team. Jenn claims that actual hijackings are now a rarity in the maps space.

While I find it hard to believe this behavior has come to a complete stop, I do think there has been a positive effort to stabilize wrongfully claimed business listings in the last month or so. Preventing and cleaning up these listings is one thing, but the bigger issue might be the ability to duplicate listings. If someone hijacks your listing, most often they have changed the phone number or URL in an effort to direct that traffic to a place of their choosing. However, the issue still remains that if hijacking is no longer an option, one can simply create a duplicate of the desired listing through a bulk upload submission.

This becomes seemingly more problematic and damaging as a duplicate listing with the correct amount of content can actually out rank the original business on key search terms. This means that anyone with the slightest amount of understanding on how these listings are ranked could potentially create another listing and have it rank higher.

The example above illustrates at least four listings for the exact same location. There are actually a few more below the fold, but the point is it’s not enough to just prevent hijackings. Of these four Venetian listings, which is the official one? An even better question would be:  Where are the phone numbers being directed for the other three listings? The creator of the duplicate listing will most likely get credit for that room reservation should a consumer see that listing first.

All in all, this is a very positive step for Google in an effort to clean up and control a very useful, but imperfect system. I would, however, like to see more emphasis directed to the duplication of listings as well.