What Is Going On With Google Local Results?

Have you signed up with Google Local Business Center and claimed your business listing yet? If not, you may want to take some time out and do it. Simply sign in to your Google account (you will need one) and add your business details. It’s something I recommend that all of my clients do.

But what happens if your Google Local listing gets hijacked, spammed or disappears?

This is exactly what appears to have happened with one of my clients. My client is a 4 star hotel based in Wales. Some months back we noticed that when you typed in its keywords into Google instead of having the name of the hotel listed under Google Local (similar to above), an affiliate site appeared – using the hotel’s name, offering reviews and even a picture (taken by the hotel). All links from this listing took you to the affiliate’s site.

Kerching! A nice little percentage goes to the affiliate.

In order to remedy this problem we listed the hotel, followed Google’s verification process and started appearing in the Google Local Business results. I thought this problem had disappeared until I took another look earlier today. This time Booking.com (i’m pretty sure) appeared where my client’s listing should appear and instead of a link to the client site, a link to the affiliate site had taken its place. And for some reason the telephone number was a mobile one, with the hotel number appearing underneath it.

Who is responsible for this? Is it the affiliate site? Or is it a 3rd party which receives a commission from the affiliate site? This is a bit like what you see with Amazon or eBay.

I’m sure that I have read somewhere that should nobody have ‘claimed ownership’ of the business listing it can default to an affiliate. Not sure if this is true or not.

Whatever the reason I find it quite poor that Google should have allowed this to happen. Surely if the business is located at an address and has verified this with Google, then that business and not an affiliate should be displayed. Something tells me that this is probably widespread across the whole of the hotel industry and affiliates are probably taking advantage of hotels’ lack of knowledge of Google Local Business Centre and, in this case, some flaw in Google’s system which lets affiliates or their partners ‘hijack’ listings.