Weird Google Search

[Ridge]

A buddy of mine owns some Custom Art Frame stores in Ohio. He called me and showed me a weird search.

If you search for his store name it says his name and his address and phone number then it gives the URL to his competitor Charles Herndon Galleries (xxxhttp://www.charlesherndon.comxxxx/

If you click on "Frame Center Gallery" it goes to his site. My buddies site is "frame center gallery"


This is the search that causes it.... http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=frame...and&fp=1&cad=b

searching for Frame Center Gallery Cleveland

I've never seen this before. So my question is how can this be fixed? Is this just a google issue? Any ideas or suggestions?

[Graham]

See attachment... if you go into the details of it on the map and click edit you will get this window:

[Ridge]

Ah very cool, took a while but we have it fixed, or at least in motion to be fixed. That;s nuts that someone can edit your maps listing.. You can prevent that, but I wonder how many people don't know

[MJ]

I used to have competitors submit my phone number to yahoo local as "not working or no longer in business" (on my flooring land based business).

It affected serps when I missed it for weeks at a time, was a really issue to deal with and couldn't really do much about it as the feature was put in place so customers could refine changed/disconnected numbers and improve local search results.

Really pissed me off, and Yahoo didn't care to reply to any of my inquiries about it.

[Ridge]

Well they have a "verify your business" thing on google now. So we did that and it all should be fixed soon.

It's a neat lesson tho, my buddy was losing a ton of business because of it and knew something was up..

Thanks again Graham!

[Graham]

No prob!

[Michael Martinez]

This practice is a particularly vicious form of parasitical SEO that has received condemnation from the SEO community but Google doesn't seem to have figured out what to do about it. They continue to pursue social media strategies with their content offerings.