Greetings from inside the SEOigloo!

You remember Mrs. Butterworth – that strange glass woman who talked to children at the breakfast table about how slowly her syrup poured. Remember how the camera would zoom in on the steaming stack of pancakes, showing the thick, rich syrup oozing down the sides at a mouthwatering, meandering crawl? Sometimes, being slow is good…but when you’re trying to be first in the world at providing accurate, helpful local information, lacking a brisk pace means falling behind and serving up confusion rather than a tasty information treat!

I love Google Maps. In fact, I’m so enthralled with local search these days that tonight I’m launching a whole new category here at the SEOigloo blog for Local SEO. Local search is becoming increasingly important to our firm and our clients’ efforts to gain and maintain visibility on the Web. But…we’ve got some problems.

The above is the hotel standing in the A (#1) position in Google Maps for a search for “lodgings inverness california”. With 46 reviews to its credit, it’s not a big surprise to see Manka’s Hotel and Restaurant winning this coveted local search position. The reviews span from calling it a fabulous retreat to the most overpriced let-down in town. It’s a famous destination that travelers either seem to love or hate with a passion. Only one problem: Manka’s burned down in December of 2006 – a whole year ago!

Tripadvisor.com, from which Google is pulling the majority of the 46 reviews, has an announcement that Manka’s burned down. Someone must have let Tripadvisor know this, but I have an inkling that it wasn’t the hotel owners themselves, as the company website (which is still in operation) has never been updated to make an announcement about the fire that destroyed this well-known hotel. My guess would be that a traveler let Tripadvisor know what happened, but that nobody has told Google and Google’s bots are not picking up on this announcement at Tripadvisor. There is a serious communication problem here, and a frustrating set of Maps results that would send a traveler on a wild goose chase, attempting to book lodgings at what Google Maps is citing as the #1 place to stay in Inverness, California.

A short while ago, I had a similar experience trying to locate a local doctor who had moved his office. We’d received a letter in the mail about this, but lost it. When I turned to Google Maps to find the doctor, months after he had moved, his old address and phone number were still being shown in the Maps results. Fortunately, his office had set up a phone message so that if you called his old telephone number, it told you he had moved and gave the new contact information. It was good of the doctor’s office to take care of communicating this very necessary piece of data to the patients. But, I found myself wondering if they’d bothered to let Google know about the change, or if they even know that they are listed in Google’s local search.

It would be simplest to put the burden of responsibility on the shoulders of the local business owner. If they move, they ought to change their listing in Google’s Local Business Center. The problem is, because Google is pulling local listings from diverse sources, many small businesses are likely in the local index without having initiated their inclusion there. They may simply be unaware that Google Maps exists, or that misinformation in Google Maps may be sending their customers in the wrong direction instead of to their door.

In the cases where the local business owner absolutely is aware of the importance of Google Maps to their business, there will be a better chance of them being scrupulous about keeping their information up to date. But this is where we run into a problem. Google has to take that new location information submitted through the Local Business Center and have it be quickly reflected in Maps if they don’t want Maps to be misleading. Unfortunately, the word on the Web and several experiences of my own indicate that it can take weeks or months for a change of address to be reflected in Maps.

What we have here, then, is a communication problem, and its a tough one for Google. Supposing they did allow a change in a local business profile to be instantly reflected in Maps. There could potentially be danger of competitive sabotage. Pizza house A could tell Google that Pizza house B is out of business. How does Google verify that this is accurate? Who does Google trust to report on the status of local businesses, particularly if the local businesses are not aware of their own listings? Is this puzzle the cause of the slowness of alterations being reflected in Maps? In other words, does a reported change trigger some type of a ‘sandbox’ filter? I would like to know.

In the traditional Yellow Pages world, we expect business listings to be refreshed on an annual basis. We know that within the course of a year, some of the businesses listed in the Yellow Pages could move or close their doors. We’re used to the idea that the Yellow Pages reflect the state of local business at the time of the most recent publication of the book.

The Web, by contrast, is live. People expect it to be as current as the daily news. It’s one thing for a business owner to have to wait a few weeks or months to start appearing in organic/universal search. The webmaster keeps a site constantly up-to-date so that whenever anyone arrives, they are seeing the most current information about the business. But webmasters cannot directly control what is appearing in local search, Maps, onebox results, etc. The result is a potential liability for any company listed in Maps; if they ever move or change their information, there will be misinformation out there about them on the Web until Maps catches up.

Google has got some of the brightest people in the world working for them. They need to find a solution to this cause of inaccuracies in their service. I believe it’s especially important for them to discover a way to speed this process up if they are serious about replacing traditional Yellow Pages as the best place to go for pertinent local business information. The last time I looked, only 1% of Internet users were using Maps to discover local business data, but now that Maps data is being included in the organic SERPs, more and more people will come to understand and use it. I’d hate to see a few experiences like mine with the absent hotel and the missing doctor sour their opinion of this wonderful tool.

Can you think of a way in which Google could speed up the updating process?

Slow syrup is great…slow communications make a service stale.

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