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So this is why when I called a locksmith last week, they took down my info and then 30 minutes later got a call from no less than 5 other locksmiths who were "on their way to my house". Nobody's phone number matched, nobody wanted to tell me who they worked for. Totally sketched out with Google Maps' suggestions, I switched to yelp. The first service I called on yelp was reasonably priced, was actually the person coming to my house, and totally hassle free. How is Yelp dealing with this when Google can't seem to?

I wouldn't give Yelp too much praise. It's been alleged that Yelp engages in astroturfing and unfair business practices[0], and the documentary "Billion Dollar Bully"[1] even accuses them of "Mob-Like Behavior".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_Dollar_Bully

Oh definitely - I can't say that I've had stellar experiences with Yelp in the past for restaurants, barbers, etc, from the consumer side, and I hear it is much worse as a business. I was just very surprised that in this niche Google performed so poorly and Yelp so well. I wouldn't go on to generalize from this experience though.

I have had great luck with Yelp. Maybe this is where Google's "no customer service" strategy starts to screw them up?

The last time I used Yelp was when it asked me to install their app to use the full feature set.

Maybe nobody's trying to game Yelp because it's not the 800lb gorilla?

That's very possible - reviews by obscurity or something. Although I really feel like 10 years ago the roles of Google and Yelp were very much reversed here. Changing times changing strategies I suppose.

This happened to me in New York, City in 2015 or so. Fun times. Really nice to understand after all these years what happened!

These kinds of businesses are common for scams, by kind of business I mean “urgent” ones: such as a locksmith, or garage door repair. In either case its unlikely you already know/have one, and you urgently want the issue fixed, so you’re most likely to search google and pick the one with the most reviews.

I had this happen to me with the garage door case, dude showed up, different name on card than the van, and different than who I even called. Searching google maps for “garage door repair” turned up tons of businesses with fake sounding names, all a ton of fake 5 star reviews.

Carpet and furniture steam cleaning is also a major offender.

Specifically for locksmiths and garage door companies, Google Ads tries to fight back against this[0]. I've gone through this with a few clients.

However, they still let lead aggregators get verified, provided they have a local business license. However, "legacy" google ads accounts like locksmithdirectory.com seem to be able to advertise anywhere in the nation.[1]

[0]https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7167635?hl=en

Oh man drives me insane towing companies

I will keep that yelp idea in mind next time

I used to work in this field (verifying local business listings). Locksmiths are traditionally the spammiest and scammiest industry of them all (along with taxis, before rideshare cut down their ROI). Basically any service area business has huge incentive to spam any and all business listing providers, and for whatever reason the locksmith industry became the worst of them. Flower delivery and personal injury lawyers often fall into the same bucket. You'll still see companies named "AAA Locksmith" and the like because this behavior dates back to the days of the Yellow Pages.

As to why Yelp is better than Google on this, I'd guess it's either that you got lucky, or that Google is more targeted than Yelp these days. I'm not up on the current state of how listing verification works now, but it's possible that Google's process is easier to target than Yelp's, and if there are any weaknesses, a locksmith marketer will figure it out pretty quickly.

(Too late to edit original post)

Just to illustrate how long locksmiths have been a problem, here's an article from 2009 talking about locksmith spam on maps. The techniques have changed but the general reliance on sketchy tactics hasn't.

https://searchengineland.com/despite-fixes-google-maps-still...

Several years back I needed a plumber in a bit of a hurry. I used Angie’s List, now angi.com, with a little less hesitancy than using Google reviews or yelp.

The plumber I hired this way did a good job at a fair price. For less urgent work I hired this company for other work even after getting bids from others.

That’s basically the same business model. It’s just a funnel.

When I needed a plumber I reached out to a bunch of buddies to see who they use.

I got quotes from three of their recommendations and ended up using the one a buddy found on the back of a church bulletin. Guy was amazing - a one man shop - super professional, fair price, quality work and replacement parts. Done in less than 1 hour. It's great to have a trustworthy plumber.

I don't know about the US but in Europe many cities/communes will list registered businesses in the area, usually these are manually curated lists. so while you don't necessarily get ratings/reviews (which I have basically stopped trusting altogether), you'll get legitimate.

Hiya jaycroft, et al. First time / long time, here. It sounds like you're already taken care of, but I hope this will benefit /someone/ reading through here. Iofd, I am a card-carrying ALoA member and professional locksmith.

The Associated Locksmiths of America (ALoA) [0] has its own search tool [1]. Of course, the same rules apply as everywhere. Not all good locksmiths are members, and not all members are good locksmiths. But, personally, I'll take the word of a trade organization over that of an advertiser any day. The real tragedy here is that both google and yelp apparently missed the opportunity to serve up a tool like this, in favor of (I'm guessing here) whoever bought the most expensive SEO package.

To answer your question: In my experience, yelp is dealing with this by being a smaller service, in every sense.

Google has, by making itself the de faco choice for each and every mode of search, become a "bucket of crabs" [2][3]. As such, it as an environment is selecting for that crab who can best pull down the other crabs, and not the "tastiest" or whatever.

That said, I can't think of anyone, off the top of my head, who puts any money into yelp. Where I live, it simply isn't popular. It's not a part of the culture, the same way that google is, and so is not as attractive to interlopers, "puppy mill"-style franchises, etc. I believe you're getting better results simply because it's too small a bucket for bad-ish actors to see it as a viable feeding target.

Back to the trades: Imho, screw search engines at large - even ALoA's. Ask your friends for recommendations. Don't have any friends? Call up your favorite cafe, and ask them who they use. Even if their tradesmen work strictly in the commercial space, and you're looking for someone to do some residential work, they /really should/ be willing to recommend another tradesman. One doesn't work in the trades for very long, without being exposed to the other players in one's area.

Lastly, I beg you: if you've found a tradesman who treated you well at a fair price - evangelize on their behalf. Tell your friends and family. Ask that locksmith for a dozen business cards. Most of us will knock a few bucks off of a service call if we were recommended by word-of-mouth. Not everything needs to be an on-line affair.

[0] - https://www.aloa.org/index.html

[1] - https://www.findalocksmith.com/

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

[3] - The only entity that wins, in this scenario, is the cat who owns the bucket... I know a number of very good tradesmen who feel like they need to spend very big money on SEO and advertising just to come out one index-position ahead of their competition. If the numbers -one and -two position, on google specifically in my area, would put aside what I call their "advertising cold war," they could both afford to take a very nice holiday every year. Sadly, they choose to subsidize some advertiser's very nice holiday. So goes the world.

edit: formatting...

> Oh and the real masters of this business model? Well they don't bother SELLING the leads to contractors, they will quite literally start their own company and will hire their own plumbers, electricians, concrete crews, etc to squeeze as much profit as possible.

Now, this part is funny. It's come full circle to a legitimate business. (Kind of)

Reminds me of the Key And Peele “Bank Heist” sketch[1].

1: https://youtu.be/jgYYOUC10aM

Yes! Or the Mitchell & Webb farming sketch:

https://youtu.be/_pDTiFkXgEE

Kind of the same path Google attempted with SEO spam, making the easiest path to success actually producing content people spend time on and link to.

Of course, this has devolved into the "life story before the recipe" sites that have become the shining failure of what can go wrong by focusing on these metrics.

The incentive to put the story on the page along with the recipe comes not from Google, but rather from US copyright law, which has decided that a plain recipe is not copyrightable; there has to be some "personal expression".

Is prepending useless text an attempt to stop copying of the recipe, or is there another incentive (besides SEO)?

It is an attempt to stop copying of the recipe by allowing the site owner to sue the copiers for copyright infringement, which is not possible -- at least in the US -- for plain recipes.

This doesn't make sense to me. Isn't the recipe itself still not subject to copyright law? What is the benefit to the creator to adding the personal expression portion?

No: that's the point: copyright law says that a plain recipe is not copyrightable -- i.e., if I copy your recipe, you cannot sue me for copyright infringement unless the recipe is mixed in with your opinions and subjective perceptions and such.

Right, I get that, but the thing people value (I think) is the recipe itself, which is also the part that can be copied (when separated from the opinions and subjective perceptions, which I suspect most people don't care about).

This was my thinking too!

It’s less shady and more a simple reinvention of the marketplace model.

The shady bit is the fake reviews and also an element of “fake it til you make it”

So they’ve also reinvented the trad VC-backed business model!

The video calls must be new. When I first made a Google My Business profile, there was no verification. Not even address verification. And then I couldn't get the listing delisted from Google either (my friend made a prank listing).

At some point they added postcard by mail verification. Then they added having to upload documents (articles of organization, pictures of store). And then the last time my account got suspended I had to make a video showing the above as well as including the cross streets in the video.

It doesn't surprise me so many people are gaming this system because it's effectively a free pass to the top of local Google searches as well as getting into Maps searches.

One thing I don't understand is why many or most of these fake businesses weren't thwarted by postcard verification. I could only come up with a couple possibilities:

- Google stopped doing postcard verification, or a loophole in the creation process lets savvy scammers avoid it (like an alternate verification method or providing a different address for the postcard).

- New business entries go live before the postcard verification, and that period is long and lucrative enough to be worth exploiting.

- They're paying local property owners to accept a postcard and read them the number - postcard mules. That seems hard to scale as big as some of these networks. Two of the "chains" had dozens of locations in one metro, all seemingly created in the same month or so. Also, some of the addresses seem like multi-unit commercial buildings where one person wouldn't receive a postcard.

Getting an address = potentially thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars in profit. Being creative on how you attain addresses is one of the main criteria for this business model.

One unique method is working exclusively with a local plumber, electrician, etc and HAVING THEM get you the addresses while you retain control of the GBP entity and sell them the leads.

The pitch goes like "you've seen the success I've had getting other clients tons of leads right? Get me 3-4 addresses in the cities you want to target and I can get them ranked" The client then asks around, uses their own address, etc to find them for you.

Thank you. That makes sense for a lot of cases. I saw some business names that had 50+ locations in one city, but I guess given enough motivation, that can be done.

Related: I submitted edits for some of the businesses (marking them "Doesn't exist") and Google rejected the edits. My Maps contribution history says "NOT APPLIED - Google couldn't verify your edit" for a long list of fake businesses. If that's how they process reports - about new businesses with obviously anomalous reviews - it's no wonder this continues.

The 'fixing up mistakes in the map' team is quite separate from the anti-spam team.

Using volunteer reports for anti-spam doesn't work because the spammers play a numbers game, and perhaps only 10% will be reported by a good citizen like you.

I guess I don't see them as mutually exclusive. I agree that relying on volunteer reports isn't sufficient, but from what we're looking at here, neither is relying on an anti-spam team/proactive detection.

(Google Maps PMs, if you're reading this: feel free to contact me to hear my experience. There are some seemingly simple, low-false-positive ways to improve reporting of fake businesses and accounts.)

To point 3, a friend of mine uses one of his client's addresses (with consent) as his GMB location. I'm assuming anyone who knows property owners would easily be able to convince most of them for a small monthly fee to use their address for this purpose.

That being said, it's very fragile. The above friend was very well reviewed (300+ >4.5 stars) and popular in his market. He told me recently Google suspended him and it destroyed his business for a bit. Not sure if he's back up but he seems to be doing better now.

What baffles me is how these networks flourish so easily yet Google can't tell a real business from a fake. The number of people calling me lately (I'm in the same business) about the Business Profile being removed by Google. Even active retail shops that have had their account for many years, with a clearly visibly business on Google maps. Their GBP simply vanishes and in a few cases, the only solution was to simply start over with a new profile.

Can’t tell or doesn’t care?

How can they start over with a new profile? It seems to me they would have to either move or get a new business name? I’m not trying to bust your chops. I am genuinely interested in this whole thing.

It was actually suggested by someone at the BGP support team. We had a different employee there create the new listing while sitting in the store. It went live with 24 hours, only none of the old reviews, pictures, or reviews were there. So they are starting over on that front.

this makes me think that they felt like some other aspect of that GBP was why they deleted it. But since they won't tell us why, we have no idea. I could guess, but any guess is just that, a guess.

Google has more data and more money than anyone on this planet, so they easily could tell fakes apart from real ones if they really wanted. The question is why they do not want to do so ... Will end up another dumb topic to be regulated in the EU in the future.

Why would Google care? Their business is making an appearance of providing useful information, not actually providing useful information.

The weird thing is that it’s often impossible to manage your own GBP. I was on the board of a small private school where a couple of knucklehead students posted some weird reviews. We couldn’t do anything until I was able to leverage a high level google contact, which is something I hate to do.

Removing reviews should be difficult for the owner of a business. It seems weird to me that someone would think it appropriate for a business to remove reviews of their business as they see fit otherwise you just get business owners removing all bad reviews

It was a weird situation where the review ran afoul of policy, but the organization wasn’t able to respond in a way that allowed them to follow a Google process. (Ie someone set something up 15 years ago with a defunct domain name or similar, and there was an “orphaned” instance of the place.)

The “fix” was to essentially reestablish the lost ownership of the business (which had paid Google Workspace and GCP presence) with their listing. Once they regained control, they were able to file a complaint and a Google reviewer removed the content.

It wasn’t a situation of “This place sucks” getting taken down.

> Google has actually begun VIDEO verification where you literally have to facetime with a Google employee to verify you own the business you say you own... even this can be gamed since any type of manual verification will be outsourced.

I feel that this is going to be a big negative externality of AI: since it makes faking everything much easier, all verification processes will become more difficult and expensive. Eventually there will start being "you must come to this office and present ID" steps, with all the associated costs.

This is interesting. I'm curious how do they achieve the opposite, i.e. deleting dozens of legitimate reviews from legitimate accounts when they have angry customers?

What's the mechanism they use to convince Google to remove them?

> GBP

Google Business Profile. its common courtesy to use the full name with the first use, THEN abbreviate.

(edit: deleted. sorry for engaging in this)

bad netiquette is rude. Forcing people to internet search a comment just to understand it is quite rude.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Etiquette_in_technology

(edit: deleted. sorry for engaging in this)

IF I think to insult them, I will make sure to take your comment into consideration. but since I HAVE NOT and do not intend to insult them, then it seems your point is moot.

For Your Information (FYI) it's common...

It's not common enough, apparently, because now you have more than one person reminding you about it.

I wasn't sure what the acronym stood for until I came to this comment explaining it, so maybe not all that common

Not very common among the readers here and hard to look up

Thanks. Spent a while wondering what the British currency had to do with plumbing.

A difficult comment to understand. I had no idea what GBP was and had only a rough idea what was being said thereafter.

GBP is a Google Business Profile.

Someone can create a bunch of them, using some evasive techniques to avoid Google identifying them as one person.

When people call asking for service, that's a potential lead. This info could be sold to a contractor.

The other piece is making the GBP compelling enough--through fake reviews, submitted by web browsers running on separate IPs--to have folks contact them.

More ambitiously, the person doing this creates their own business, hiring out service crews to do the work and capturing more of the profit.

Maybe this is why Google will lobby the government to restrict the distribution of open source AI models.

https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/1618705267801325568?s=6...

I'm with you up to this point:

> Oh and the real masters of this business model? Well they don't bother SELLING the leads to contractors, they will quite literally start their own company and will hire their own plumbers, electricians, concrete crews, etc to squeeze as much profit as possible.

So... the real masters of the business model are the ones... actually operating the businesses they claim to be operating?

The difference is that these companies figured out that the real business is SEO and leadgen and the actual work is secondary. The capital H hard problem isn’t plumbing it’s finding work. Once you own the sales funnel it’s game over for anyone else.

There are tutorials for building you own mobile proxy pool so it’s very accessible these days: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/byo-mobile-proxy-for-web-scrap...

> they will quite literally start their own company and will hire

At that point... Are they even fake anymore?

this is a serious question, and the answers bring the reader back to the fundamental promises of a civil society.. not at all simple

How is the address verification via street view passed?

I have an interesting story in that vein. (genericised to avoid shaming anyone)

Back in the late '00s I did development for a SEO-focused agency. We got a small firm that did a specific type of rental equipment. This was an industry that was traditionally very local and Yellow Pages oriented, to the point where leading brands were usually names like "A-Amazing AAA Aardvark Services".

The page was good enough that it started ranking on out-of-region searches.

So we built them a huge "directory" site. It had pages of spun content for almost every named city in the country, and we peppered it with a few listings of local service providers.

It was on the edge of being an actual useful resource; they went to their industry trade show and could say "We're page 1 (and frequently result 1) for that service name in almost every city in the country." It had your usual late-2000s/early-2010s good-practice SEO stuff-- well-formed URLs, tidy redirects everywhere, a few paragraphs of text on every page. They started taking a listing fee, allowing coverage at a per-county level.

It worked very well; getting real listings improved the actual user value of the rubbish content site and added further randomness to the generated content.

But anyway, they got greedy. They still had people calling their central phone number and wanting them to do reservations for them, which let them take a much higher commission than a listing fee paid. We built them some tooling to manage that sort of reservations. This is essentially the business model the fake GBP you mention is, except that for one narrow segment of the country, they were the service provider. More importantly, they replaced all the individual vendor contact info with their own.

They really wanted to hand over things to one of the owners' sons, who (along with the owner) had some very colourful pasts and questionable decision making abilities. So we let them go their own way, and continued to experiment with the model in other industries. Got good results in one other vertical, and a handful that just rotted on the vine.

But when we turn away, the site starts tanking in rankings. Maybe SEO spam detection improved, maybe removing the phone numbers made it obvious there wasn't much real content there. They ended up making various frantic changes trying to salvage the flow, but it was never the same. When I left the agency in the late 2010s, they were making frantic rework efforts trying to recapture the lost magic.

So I'd say the business concept can work, but it's weird how we have it being a SEO guy first. You'd think you'd find the service companies driving things-- by forming some sort of marketing/branding co-op with similar firms in different markets, they could split the costs of maintaining the SEO presence, and hiring a captive developer means they would be able to organize a flat rate dev contract rather than paying a high per-lead commission.

I appreciate your honesty but you are dooming civilisation