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Sneaky Spam in Local Search

Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 02/12/2009 - 06:08.

Posted by rebecca

My coworker Mike and I were pondering lunch options today and decided to order from the Honey Hole, one of Seattle's best sandwich places. Every day the place has a line out the door because it's a popular haven for hungry Seattleites who want a belly full of sandwichy goodness, so sometimes we elect to call our order in and pick it up.

Mike and I both independently searched for the Honey Hole's website so we could check out their menu and call in an order. I typed in "honeyhole seattle" and found their site right away. Mike, on the other hand, typed in "honey hole sandwhich seattle" because he's a developer and can't spell (ha ha, burn). Here's what my search result looked like:

I had to expand the map in order to see it, but once I did the search result displayed the map, the Honey Hole's address and some lovely sitelinks. Pretty premium local search result, if you ask me.

Now here's Mike's search result:

The "Did you mean" prompt appears, and the Honey Hole's website pops up first, though, as you can see, the map isn't automatically shown (you have to expand it). The result that draws my eye to it is the one that says "Honeyhole Sandwiches" and displays www.honeyhole.com. It's displaying a map and the location's address, and although this result doesn't have sitelinks, it does display a positive review of the restaurant. You'd think that the Honey Hole registered both thehoneyhole.com and honeyhole.com, but upon clicking through to www.honeyhole.com, that's clearly not the case:

Yikes...clearly that site doesn't sell sandwiches (or if they do, they're of the curiously erotic variety). TheHoneyHole.com and HoneyHole.com are clearly two different sites, but why does HoneyHole.com getting a map, address, and reviews shown along with its search result as if it's the actual sandwich shop? Is it a mistake on Google's part? It looks like HoneyHole.com is geotargeting users since I got "swinger seattle" and "stripper seattle" as related searches via the home page--is the geotargeting combined with the nearly identical domain name confusing Google? Is this a bug? Is it easy to infiltrate local search results and mimic a legit local business like a pornographic chameleon (they come and go, they come and go-whoa-whoa-whoa)?

I'm not a local search expert, so I'm really looking forward to hearing your opinion as to how this result popped up. In the meantime, I'll be enjoying my sandwich from the non-porny Honey Hole...

UPDATE: Mike Blumenthal commented below that it happens when a record goes unclaimed by the local business, which causes Google to algorithmically choose which result seems to best match with the (seemingly appropriate) local information. He wrote a post about it over at his blog, so check it out. Thanks, Mike!

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