I read the other day in I, Cringely’s Blog that Google had a booth last month at the Online Lenders Association convention in Chicago, a group mostly composed of Payday lenders… you know the ones… they charge ~400% to help poor folks get from one pay check to a smaller one. What Google was doing at their convention I have no idea. This is legal part of American society for which I have little sympathy and less respect.

The article, however, about Google’s involvment reminded me that I had written extensively about spamming techniques in the Payday Loan industry as far back as as 2007. I did a quick search on Google for Cash Advance NY NY and the first result struck a bell for me and seemed oddly familiar. I did similar searches in Buffalo and a few other cities and saw much the same…

While Google’s effort at fighting spam might be criticized, their ability to search and sort my back library is near faultless. It turns out that I had written about this very company in a December, 2007 Searchengineland article titled: MapSpammers Getting More Sophisticated. In the article I detailed their techniques having used the exact same search & company as the example spam. At the time I included a screen shot of the Local results showing their #1 standing.  I noted:

The basics of the plan are simple (as originally described at oooff.com):

• Rent a mailing address with forwarding in every major market near the centroid of the city (UPS is one of many that offer this service)
• Obtain a domain name for each city with a relevant “location + service” domain
• Create a website that returns an optimized “location + service” page for the domain
• Enter the businesses in the Google Local Business Center (if you are doing the top 50 metro markets, not such a big deal) note: skip this and the next step if using Yahoo Local
• Enter the PIN numbers when they are forwarded to you
• Get rich quick

The folks at Google have mentioned on several occasions that they frequently allow spam into the Maps index so that it can be used to train and inoculate the system against future spam as they use it to increase their understanding of it. That may be so but leaving this crap in the system to display so prominently actively puts Google in the middle of a vicious cycle of exploitation.

With babies these days, there is a great deal of research that indicates that allowing them to actively play in the dirt is good for them and inoculates their system against a host of potential ailments and creates a dynamic with the bacteria that leads to increased happiness. But at the end of the day, a good parent still brings them inside and washes them off.

Google should take the lesson to heart. In the three years since this exact problem was reported, their baby, the Maps index, has started to grow up and deserves a decent bath.

(To see what Google sees at 118 Fulton St. NY NY)…

I look at Yahoo Local rarely and report on it even less. However, my lack of attention to it doesn’t mean that Locksmiths are not interested in playing there. And while this is old news, with Google Places having become a difficult place for them to play, locksmiths have moved on (for the most part) to the next easy pickings. I am sure that the exposure is not as great but a small fish is better than no fish at all and one can still marvel at their audacity.

Jeff Manger of Trumpet Local Media pointed out this search for watch repair in Boulder, co at Yahoo that turns up locksmith spam even in categories as unrelated as watch repair. When you do search on Locksmiths the results are “impressive” with the top 4 listings each showing more than 450 reviews each.

Since Yahoo’s algo so heavily favors review count, they appear to be in an arms race with number 3, Boulder Locksmith Service 24/7 having gathered over 400 reviews since the first of August… a clip of almost 7 reviews a day…. The number of their reviews alone amount to 1% of all households in Boulder. The top 4 listings have procured reviews from over 5% of the households. No small task that.

Obviously, as Jeff pointed out in his email, this decay doesn’t just affect the locksmith listings but has moved out and is polluting other categories as well. I recognize that Yahoo has other things on their plate. But unless they are going to proactively manage local they should be selling it off to Microsoft as well.

Netmarketshare has released their September numbers and mobile browsing has climbed to 2.8% of all browsing and increase of 136% year over year.

In the “battle” between iOS4 and Android they report “although Android devices are rapidly gaining usage share, iOS has 4.9 times the global usage share of all Android devices”.