Many great articles have exposed the seedy underbelly of Local Services Ads spam and fake reviews. There’s one on Search Engine Roundtable regarding fake reviews and another on Search Engine Land where Len Raleigh talked about location spam, reviews, names and ads.
I recently learned from a client that the dark hole goes a little deeper than just being misleading on locations and reviews.
This discovery will make those in the local SEO space recall what was seen in the personal injury and the garage door spaces.
Fighting spam in local search
In the last two years, we have seen location spam and review spam proliferate.
There were also large lead gen networks involved that would trash an area with fake profiles, bolster them with reviews and then turn around and sell those leads to merchants – usually the same merchants they had buried.
Several people in the local SEO space banded together and helped reduce that volume of spam. And eventually, Google took some action.
While that spam is still around in some form to this day, it appears that they have moved into another area that Google is not good at – or does not want to police actively.
As fellow digital marketer and SEO expert Dennis Yu told me:
- “Spam in the garage door space is just as bad as it is in the personal injury law space, it is unfair to businesses and consumers. As marketing agencies embrace LSA more, this has to be taken into consideration as any move you make can be disrupted by bad actors at any time, and...
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