Take a look what happens if you don’t claim your Google Local listing.
I was doing some research for a client, and found that many Google Local profiles and being pointed to business directories. Take a look at this local search result for “hair salons saratoga,ca”
Notice how the website address for many of the listings is “www.sanjose.com.”
If you click to go to the website for the business, it takes you to a directory page full of advertisements, with no mention of the business you found on Google Local!
It seems that this is happening primarily to businesses who have not claimed their listing in Google. The company that runs this sanjose.com website, Boulevards, appears to be a data provider to Google. Somehow the website for these profiles is getting pointed to the business directory, whether the business owner has a website or not.
If you look at the actual Google profiles for the businesses, they are not claimed by the business owner, and the URL is replaced with the sanjose.com URL.
However, I found that for a friend of mine who owns a local business, they had their proper URL to their website in their Google profile, and it was replaced with the directory URL. I don’t want to disclose this businesses name, but I have screenshots of before and after this occurred.
This is just wrong. Looking into this domain a little bit, it seems to be owned by a company named Boulevards. Perhaps they are managing this portal for the city of San Jose, I can’t tell.
Businesses who have legitimate websites but may not have claimed their Google profile are losing valuable web traffic and giving it away to this unethical web data provider.
Anyone who helps small businesses with local search will tell you to claim your Google Local profile. See our QuickStart Guide for Local Search for some tips. Here is yet another example of the importance of claiming it.
If you have any information on this, please chime in below or contact me.
Update: This is similar to the floral industry case that Mike Blumenthal blogged about here. But it is a little different, in that it is a city business directory that the profiles get pointed at.
Update #2: After comments from Mike and others, this is different from the hijacking and map spam cases. This may just be Google’s algorithm mistakenly pointing profiles that have not been claimed to what it thinks is an authoritative source.
But either way, this is a very good reason to claim your profile so it doesn’t happen to your business.
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Hi Don
I think that what you are seeing here is a case of Google’s somewhat aggressive algo that wants to assign an authoritative web site to a business listing.
There is no indication that this record has been edited via community edit..you would see an edit history in that case. No one has claimed the record as indicated by the details tab.
This algo which is pretty good at assigning the best webpage to a business listing can do some weird stuff. Once it assigned a competitor to a listing that I had claimed but neglected to add the URL to.
In this case, Google appears to have assigned the directory listing as the business probably had no web site.
Mike Blumenthal
Thanks Mike. What you are saying makes sense, and I see the difference between this case and the hijacking cases now.
So this probably had nothing to do with sanjose.com or Boulevards, rather Google’s algo mistakenly pointing the directory to the wrong URL.
I’ve modified the post so that it doesn’t come down on Boulevards.
Hey Don,
Mike is definitely the expert here on this kind of thing, so I’ll defer to him. But I tend to agree that Boulevards wouldn’t be engaging in any malicious behavior, since companies like the ones listed here are their target audience for selling advertising. It’s clear just how important it is to claim your LBC listing, though!
As David, says it is but one more reason to claim your listing.
It is also very confusing to those small businesses that see a wrong URL on their listing or their URL on someone else’s listing. If you go into the groups it is usually ascribed to competitor skullduggery as many don’t even realize that they should claim their listing.
Mike Blumenthal
this may not have been a case of google local spam, but it does happen. the point i think Don was making is that sm biz’s need to claim their listings to help protect themselves and that is solid advice. it still always surprises me when a sm biz has not yet taken advantage of these free local listings offered by the search engines.
I often wonder where Google finds some its more obscure business information, particularly of newer businesses which haven’t even had telephones installed, much less gotten themselves listed in directories, but it is clear that Google is aggressively building its local business database and something is feeding it the data. I wonder if SanJose.com has, or has once had, a comprehensive directory of businesses in their neighborhood, including some for which data could not be found anywhere else–or at least not at the time Google ultimately decided that SanJose.com’s information was good enough? Perhaps they struck a deal with Boulevards, or more likely they are adopting a policy of linking to uncollaborated source in order to minimize potential for ip infringement liability.
Pretty interesting information, looks like google still has some stuff to iron out.