G'day all,
Been watching the threads here. In some ways it's nice to see that I'm not the only one experiencing the chaos created by Google, but at the same time I feel your pain.
Alternate directories are a big problem with the LBC. Google certainly scapes this information and why the hell they put a higher value on the content than the owner's own information has got me beat. A client of mine has just cancelled his Yellow Pages listing because as soon as they fixed it, it just went up the creek again with the next feed to Google from their database.
Although Google is taking it's main feed from Yellow Pages now, (it used to be TruLocal), it creates some interesting situations from my observations.
First of all, you will quite often notice that several of the listings that actually appear on the front page have mobile phone numbers. These do NOT come from Yellow Pages and appear to be a method of "gaming" the system.
Secondly, if there is a feed from Yellow Pages and an owner verified listing in the system, you will have problems because of duplicate listings, particularly if they are at the same address. So, if you "claimed" your listing in the pre Yellow days, a new listing may have been created by Yellow when they started feeding Google with their data.
Of course there is so much speculation and so little information and as someone has already said in the thread here, the gaming of the system is absolutely rife. If this were organic
SEO, Google would have jumped on it ages ago.
As a sidenote, I found that this thread is actually ranking on Page 1 of Google for Local Search at number 9. Perhaps someone from Google will actually see it and take some damn action about their entire algorithm for local search.
Cheers,
Re: Are You Checking Your Google Local Business Listings? 
