Nationwide Google Maps Spam…All Gone

Yesterday both Stephen Peron of Imnotadoctor.com and then Mike Blumenthal of blumenthals.com discussed some nationwide Google Maps spam by a company called Big Local. As of 4 PM (Mountain time) today while having a discussion with Mike the spam was still there, and now at 9 PM it is gone!

The oddest part about it was that the listings appeared to be slurped in rather than being submitted because they could still be “claimed” by the business (which isn’t the case when you submit manually or in bulk). There was no evidence of their phone number or addresses published, so it had to be submitted or through one of Google’s data providers.

The Google Maps spam was both Big Local’s fault (devious submissions) and Google’s fault (poor spam filters). When you’ve got a city like Los Angeles where Google’s Local onebox shows all 10 listings for one company, there is definitely an issue on both sides.

Google Maps Spam Los Angeles

Google has obviously responded and wiped out Big Local from any local listings, as well as any listings altogether (except for clovers.com which redirects to their site).

Google Maps Spam Los Angeles

Great job to Stephen and Mike for getting the word out, and to Google Maps for responding fairly quickly (2 days, and on a Saturday!).

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Google Maps. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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