Google Local Results Spam by Local Businesses

I was in a Twitter conversation with Rishi Lakhani earlier and Rishi posted a link of Google search results for the term “take away london” and this is what came up:

Now here we have a local business that’s got the 4 of the top listings in Google Local. That’s great right? They seem to be an authority, that Google trusts them to be important enough that they’ve given them 40% of the listings in the local results. There’s just one problem though, this company has zero organic results on the first page, the second, the third, actually they have no organic results in any of the top 10 pages (100 total results, I gave up after that).

I’m a little bit lost. If Google thinks a company is relevant to the search query, and important enough to give it 4 top local listings, which in accordance with AOL’s leaked search data (I know it’s for organic search and not local) is worth 50.98% of all clicks, then why aren’t they important enough to be in the top 100 organic results for the same search query.

Local search is cool and I’m sure if you’re looking for a specific pizza chain you want to receive only those results in your local to find the closest one, but there needs to be some sort of correlation between the great quality of work and Spam filtering Google and Matt Cutts do in their organic results and the quality of Google Local.

I twittered Matt Cutts about this and this was his answer:

I don’t know if these restaurants are legitimate or not, I honestly believe they are. I don’t think that this restaurant has had Google Local verification cards sent to all their family members spread over London and then entered all their addresses in order to get more listings. My one issue is that it makes no sense that they can have this kind of presence in the local listings without ANY presence in the organic listings. I think that Google needs to make that connection and soon for their local results to have any kind of credibility.

Danny Sullivan from Search Engine Land also did a write up about something similar and how he managed to hijack some local results and change the details, you can check his post as well, it’s worth the read for sure.