Google will now no more be posting the interim message ‘Reported To Be Closed’ about a business on its place page, a practice that it had been following so far. Rather, from now onwards it will first review every such news that will come to its knowledge. Then, after getting sure about the authenticity of the information, only then will Google report the business to be ‘Closed’. Google said, “As promised, we’ve recently made a change to our process of displaying when a business has been reported to be closed on its place page. More specifically, we have removed the interim notification about a report having been made so that a listing will only be updated after it has been reviewed by Google and we believe the change to be accurate. ”

Google believes that doing away with the ‘Reported To Be Closed’ information will reduce the scope for the display of any inaccurate information. The search engine has said that they know the importance of accurate listings on Google Maps for many businesses, and that they will do all they can to fight spam and abuse. It also has apologized to both businesses and users for the problems they had to face due to the spam labeling. Google said, “we’re committed to making sure that users and potential customers continue to have the most up-to-date and accurate information possible.”

How Google will verify with the business owners still remains to be seen. However, the move has been welcomed by businesses all over the world.

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The article sheds light on how the Locksmith spam that’s taking place in the Seattle area of USA, especially for the search query of “emergency locksmith Seattle.” Whilst the image depicts searches which are local to Seattle area, however according to the article in the Times the state that only seven local listings were local to the area. According to New York Times’s David Segal, “They are phone banks, typically set up in far-off places, often in other countries. Call them and they’ll dispatch a locksmith. Some are legitimate, but others may all too often do shoddy work and/or charge two or three times the estimate.”

The New York Times elaborately goes on to explain as to how these companies created fake listings by using the name, address or phones numbers or NAP of an already existing entities (like government buildings) altogether to trick Google and get around their local listing guidelines. In addition to that, to improve their rankings they would go on to use local citation and make references to locality.

Honestly, we all know it is nothing new. Google is certainly not full proof. Besides, why are we always so harsh on Google. Agreed it is become the contemporary Yellow Pages. However didn’t the traditional Yellow Pages face similar problems? Of leads which were practically spam too? Didn’t Yellow Pages have pages after pages of leads which were not from the area and forced you to spend ridiculous amounts when you called them? So, it could be questioned as to why such harsh criticism towards Google? Perhaps because, with Google our general perception is to only scan through the results that appear on the first page. Perhaps this explains the growing hostility Google is facing as the number of black hat SEO’s are making every effort to show up on their first page.

When New York Times contacted Google about the locksmith spam issue, Google’s Gabriel Stricker made the following statement, “We’re aware of the gaming practices happening in the locksmith industry — practices which long predate Google and have affected the Yellow Pages for decades. We’ve implemented several measures to combat this issue, including improving our spam-detection algorithms and working with the locksmith industry to find solutions.”

Whilst the Times article does not really unearth a new issue. One can only hope that locals who search for locksmiths amongst other services are made aware of the Bible-faith they have on Google. And on Google’s part, hopefully this will lead to added security measures they will need to take in order to resolve this long on going problem if they wish to maintain their ever growing domination over the search land. The burning question is, will they be able to fight these black-hat practices?

Check out Page Traffic Buzz for more articles by Navneet Kaushal

If you have questions, submit them in Google Moderator page and vote on other webmasters’ questions. The team is most likely to choose the most voted for questions to answer first!

“The Google Anti-Malware engineering team knows you have many questions related to our scanning and flagging of infected sites, some with short and simple answers and some with more complex answers. The short-answer questions are already — we hope — adequately handled on the Webmaster Forums; now we want to do a better job at answering the more complex questions.

To this end, we have created a Google Moderator page for you to submit your questions, and to vote on other webmasters’ questions. In two weeks (on Friday the 28th of August), we will close the page and select a few of the top-rated questions. Over the course of the next several weeks, we will do our best to answer each of these in a write-up, to be published here and to the Webmaster Malware Forum.

We hope to repeat this exercise (with a fresh Moderator page) in the fall to give you the opportunity to ask more questions.”- Oliver Fisher.

Forum discussion is going on at Google Webmaster Help.

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According to the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog,

“We have noticed spammers going after a wide range of websites, from large well-known companies to small local government agencies.”

What can you do to solve this problem?

• Change the redirect code to check the referer, since in most cases everyone coming to your redirect script legitimately should come from your site, not a search engine or elsewhere. You may need to be permissive, since some users’ browsers may not report a referer, but if you know a user is coming from an external site you can stop or warn them.
• If your script should only ever send users to an internal page or file (for example, on a page with file downloads), you should specifically disallow off-site redirects.
• Consider using a whitelist of safe destinations. In this case your code would keep a record of all outgoing links, and then check to make sure the redirect is a legitimate destination before forwarding the user on.
• Consider signing your redirects. If your website does have a genuine need to provide URL redirects, you can properly hash the destination URL and then include that cryptographic signature as another parameter when doing the redirect. That allows your own site to do URL redirection without opening your URL redirector to the general public.
• If your site is really not using it, just disable or remove the redirect. We have noticed a large number of sites where the only use of the redirect is by spammers-it’s probably just a feature left turned on by default.
• Use robots.txt to exclude search engines from the redirect scripts on your site. This won’t solve the problem completely, as attackers could still use your domain in email spam. Your site will be less attractive to attackers, though, and users won’t get tricked via web search results. If your redirect scripts reside in a subfolder with other scripts that don’t need to appear in search results, excluding the entire subfolder may even make it harder for spammers to find redirect scripts in the first place.
• You can also use Webmaster Tools to remove URLs. Chances are that the spammers have also hacked and abused other sites to generate links to the spammed section of your site. If you see suspicious sites or spammed forums linking in, feel free to report those to us, preferably with the verified spam report form in Webmaster Tools.

Tune in to the official blog for more information.

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