How Google Map Hackers Can Destroy a Business at Will

[Morreion]

How Google Map Hackers Can Destroy a Business at Will (Wired)

...Beneath its slick interface and crystal clear GPS-enabled vision of the world, Google Maps roils with local rivalries, score-settling, and deception. Maps are dotted with thousands of spam business listings for nonexistent locksmiths and plumbers. Legitimate businesses sometimes see their listings hijacked by competitors or cloned into a duplicate with a different phone number or website. In January, someone bulk-modified the Google Maps presence of thousands of hotels around the country, changing the website URLs to a commercial third-party booking site (which siphons off the commissions).

Small businesses are the usual targets. In a typical case in 2010, Buffalo-based Barbara Oliver & Co Jewelry saw its Google Maps listing changed to “permanently closed” at the exact same time that it was flooded with fake and highly unfavorable customer reviews. “We narrowed it down as to who it was. It was another jeweler who had tampered with it,” says Barbara Oliver, the owner. “The bottom line was the jeweler put five-star reviews on his Google reviews, and he slammed me and three other local jewelers, all within a couple of days.”

Oliver’s Google Maps listing was repaired, because she had something Bertagna didn’t have: a web consultant on retainer feeding and caring for her Internet presence. That consultant, Mike Blumenthal, says he’s countered a lot of similar tampering over the years.


There's so many ways to game social media that I really don't trust it. The article talks about countermeasures that Google has taken, but it seems like it's a constant arms race.

[Regolyth]

It's a sad story, but I'm going to have to agree with most of the commenters... it's not Google's fault. The person making the negative posts is certainly at fault, but so is the owner. Dropping 75% of your business in a few months is huge; he had to have started doing something wrong. Some of the commenters had my same opinions:

Don't get me wrong, I feel for the guy and there definitely are issues with basically all the social media and other media relying on user generated content.
But that being said I think Bertagna needs to face the facts. If you loose 75% of your customers because of a single failure on a single communication/marketing channel, then the problem is your marketing strategy or some other internal issue with your business model, not Google or any other random third party.
We saw the same thing happen when Google rolled out the first Panda update in '11. A lot of people got their panties in a bunch, businesses went under and people started suing. The excact same thing happened with the Penquin update and pretty much every iteration of the two updates that we've seen since.
I find it amazing that people still haven't learned the lesson. Google is a company. They're not your friends or a public service for the good of mankind. To me it's naïve and basically unprofessional to put all your eggs in one basket, as people do with Google.

In short, you need to minimize your risk and that means you can't rely solely on organic Google results to generate revenue for you.

It saddens me too, to see an elderly person take a hit. But that's beside the point and you appealing to our feelings doesn't change the facts.
The guy didn't take any steps, either by educating himself or hiring the appropriate staff, to keep his business or marketing strategy viable under today's market conditions. And yeah that sucks, but at the end of the day he's responsible for the succes of his business, not Google.
It doesn't matter if you're 25 or 75, the lesson to be learned here is that it's insanely risky to put all your eggs in one basket. Especially if that basket is something as flimsical as Google that has a history of changing the performance and functionality at the drop of a hat. Only thing worse than that is to flat out ignore when fundamental changes are going on in whatever market you're in.
It's a sad story but it isn't a story about big bad Google crushing the little guy. It's a story about a guy who got old and lost touch with the business he was in. And that is one of the oldest stories, and a story that'll be told time and time again - it's called "life".