[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yelp [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_Dollar_Bully
I had this happen to me with the garage door case, dude showed up, different name on card than the van, and different than who I even called. Searching google maps for “garage door repair” turned up tons of businesses with fake sounding names, all a ton of fake 5 star reviews.
However, they still let lead aggregators get verified, provided they have a local business license. However, "legacy" google ads accounts like locksmithdirectory.com seem to be able to advertise anywhere in the nation.[1]
[0]https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/7167635?hl=en
I will keep that yelp idea in mind next time
As to why Yelp is better than Google on this, I'd guess it's either that you got lucky, or that Google is more targeted than Yelp these days. I'm not up on the current state of how listing verification works now, but it's possible that Google's process is easier to target than Yelp's, and if there are any weaknesses, a locksmith marketer will figure it out pretty quickly.
Just to illustrate how long locksmiths have been a problem, here's an article from 2009 talking about locksmith spam on maps. The techniques have changed but the general reliance on sketchy tactics hasn't.
https://searchengineland.com/despite-fixes-google-maps-still...
The plumber I hired this way did a good job at a fair price. For less urgent work I hired this company for other work even after getting bids from others.
I got quotes from three of their recommendations and ended up using the one a buddy found on the back of a church bulletin. Guy was amazing - a one man shop - super professional, fair price, quality work and replacement parts. Done in less than 1 hour. It's great to have a trustworthy plumber.
The Associated Locksmiths of America (ALoA) [0] has its own search tool [1]. Of course, the same rules apply as everywhere. Not all good locksmiths are members, and not all members are good locksmiths. But, personally, I'll take the word of a trade organization over that of an advertiser any day. The real tragedy here is that both google and yelp apparently missed the opportunity to serve up a tool like this, in favor of (I'm guessing here) whoever bought the most expensive SEO package.
To answer your question: In my experience, yelp is dealing with this by being a smaller service, in every sense.
Google has, by making itself the de faco choice for each and every mode of search, become a "bucket of crabs" [2][3]. As such, it as an environment is selecting for that crab who can best pull down the other crabs, and not the "tastiest" or whatever.
That said, I can't think of anyone, off the top of my head, who puts any money into yelp. Where I live, it simply isn't popular. It's not a part of the culture, the same way that google is, and so is not as attractive to interlopers, "puppy mill"-style franchises, etc. I believe you're getting better results simply because it's too small a bucket for bad-ish actors to see it as a viable feeding target.
Back to the trades: Imho, screw search engines at large - even ALoA's. Ask your friends for recommendations. Don't have any friends? Call up your favorite cafe, and ask them who they use. Even if their tradesmen work strictly in the commercial space, and you're looking for someone to do some residential work, they /really should/ be willing to recommend another tradesman. One doesn't work in the trades for very long, without being exposed to the other players in one's area.
Lastly, I beg you: if you've found a tradesman who treated you well at a fair price - evangelize on their behalf. Tell your friends and family. Ask that locksmith for a dozen business cards. Most of us will knock a few bucks off of a service call if we were recommended by word-of-mouth. Not everything needs to be an on-line affair.
[0] - https://www.aloa.org/index.html
[1] - https://www.findalocksmith.com/
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
[3] - The only entity that wins, in this scenario, is the cat who owns the bucket... I know a number of very good tradesmen who feel like they need to spend very big money on SEO and advertising just to come out one index-position ahead of their competition. If the numbers -one and -two position, on google specifically in my area, would put aside what I call their "advertising cold war," they could both afford to take a very nice holiday every year. Sadly, they choose to subsidize some advertiser's very nice holiday. So goes the world.
edit: formatting...
At some point they added postcard by mail verification. Then they added having to upload documents (articles of organization, pictures of store). And then the last time my account got suspended I had to make a video showing the above as well as including the cross streets in the video.
It doesn't surprise me so many people are gaming this system because it's effectively a free pass to the top of local Google searches as well as getting into Maps searches.
- Google stopped doing postcard verification, or a loophole in the creation process lets savvy scammers avoid it (like an alternate verification method or providing a different address for the postcard).
- New business entries go live before the postcard verification, and that period is long and lucrative enough to be worth exploiting.
- They're paying local property owners to accept a postcard and read them the number - postcard mules. That seems hard to scale as big as some of these networks. Two of the "chains" had dozens of locations in one metro, all seemingly created in the same month or so. Also, some of the addresses seem like multi-unit commercial buildings where one person wouldn't receive a postcard.
One unique method is working exclusively with a local plumber, electrician, etc and HAVING THEM get you the addresses while you retain control of the GBP entity and sell them the leads.
The pitch goes like "you've seen the success I've had getting other clients tons of leads right? Get me 3-4 addresses in the cities you want to target and I can get them ranked" The client then asks around, uses their own address, etc to find them for you.
Related: I submitted edits for some of the businesses (marking them "Doesn't exist") and Google rejected the edits. My Maps contribution history says "NOT APPLIED - Google couldn't verify your edit" for a long list of fake businesses. If that's how they process reports - about new businesses with obviously anomalous reviews - it's no wonder this continues.
Using volunteer reports for anti-spam doesn't work because the spammers play a numbers game, and perhaps only 10% will be reported by a good citizen like you.
(Google Maps PMs, if you're reading this: feel free to contact me to hear my experience. There are some seemingly simple, low-false-positive ways to improve reporting of fake businesses and accounts.)
That being said, it's very fragile. The above friend was very well reviewed (300+ >4.5 stars) and popular in his market. He told me recently Google suspended him and it destroyed his business for a bit. Not sure if he's back up but he seems to be doing better now.
AKA Google Business Profile. FYI its common courtesy to use the full name with the first use, THEN abbreviate.
What's the mechanism they use to convince Google to remove them?
The “fix” was to essentially reestablish the lost ownership of the business (which had paid Google Workspace and GCP presence) with their listing. Once they regained control, they were able to file a complaint and a Google reviewer removed the content.
It wasn’t a situation of “This place sucks” getting taken down.
Now, this part is funny. It's come full circle to a legitimate business. (Kind of)
Of course, this has devolved into the "life story before the recipe" sites that have become the shining failure of what can go wrong by focusing on these metrics.
It’s less shady and more a simple reinvention of the marketplace model.
The shady bit is the fake reviews and also an element of “fake it til you make it”
So they’ve also reinvented the trad VC-backed business model!
Back in the late '00s I did development for a SEO-focused agency. We got a small firm that did a specific type of rental equipment. This was an industry that was traditionally very local and Yellow Pages oriented, to the point where leading brands were usually names like "A-Amazing AAA Aardvark Services".
The page was good enough that it started ranking on out-of-region searches.
So we built them a huge "directory" site. It had pages of spun content for almost every named city in the country, and we peppered it with a few listings of local service providers.
It was on the edge of being an actual useful resource; they went to their industry trade show and could say "We're page 1 (and frequently result 1) for that service name in almost every city in the country." It had your usual late-2000s/early-2010s good-practice SEO stuff-- well-formed URLs, tidy redirects everywhere, a few paragraphs of text on every page. They started taking a listing fee, allowing coverage at a per-county level.
It worked very well; getting real listings improved the actual user value of the rubbish content site and added further randomness to the generated content.
But anyway, they got greedy. They still had people calling their central phone number and wanting them to do reservations for them, which let them take a much higher commission than a listing fee paid. We built them some tooling to manage that sort of reservations. This is essentially the business model the fake GBP you mention is, except that for one narrow segment of the country, they were the service provider. More importantly, they replaced all the individual vendor contact info with their own.
They really wanted to hand over things to one of the owners' sons, who (along with the owner) had some very colourful pasts and questionable decision making abilities. So we let them go their own way, and continued to experiment with the model in other industries. Got good results in one other vertical, and a handful that just rotted on the vine.
But when we turn away, the site starts tanking in rankings. Maybe SEO spam detection improved, maybe removing the phone numbers made it obvious there wasn't much real content there. They ended up making various frantic changes trying to salvage the flow, but it was never the same. When I left the agency in the late 2010s, they were making frantic rework efforts trying to recapture the lost magic.
So I'd say the business concept can work, but it's weird how we have it being a SEO guy first. You'd think you'd find the service companies driving things-- by forming some sort of marketing/branding co-op with similar firms in different markets, they could split the costs of maintaining the SEO presence, and hiring a captive developer means they would be able to organize a flat rate dev contract rather than paying a high per-lead commission.
this makes me think that they felt like some other aspect of that GBP was why they deleted it. But since they won't tell us why, we have no idea. I could guess, but any guess is just that, a guess.
> Oh and the real masters of this business model? Well they don't bother SELLING the leads to contractors, they will quite literally start their own company and will hire their own plumbers, electricians, concrete crews, etc to squeeze as much profit as possible.
So... the real masters of the business model are the ones... actually operating the businesses they claim to be operating?
At that point... Are they even fake anymore?
I feel that this is going to be a big negative externality of AI: since it makes faking everything much easier, all verification processes will become more difficult and expensive. Eventually there will start being "you must come to this office and present ID" steps, with all the associated costs.
Someone can create a bunch of them, using some evasive techniques to avoid Google identifying them as one person.
When people call asking for service, that's a potential lead. This info could be sold to a contractor.
The other piece is making the GBP compelling enough--through fake reviews, submitted by web browsers running on separate IPs--to have folks contact them.
More ambitiously, the person doing this creates their own business, hiring out service crews to do the work and capturing more of the profit.
https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/1618705267801325568?s=6...
There's an enormous and growing market of fake GBPs for the purpose of selling leads called Local SEO Lead Gen. (each entity can bring in thousands of dollars/month.)
The thinking is why go through the headache of dealing with clients who can fire you the day after they begin ranking (Local SEO is heavily "front loaded" work wise), will always try undercutting you on price, etc, when you can CREATE YOUR OWN entity, get that ranked and then SELL the leads to that plumber. You're the one with 100% control and if the plumber isn't happy, there's a dozen others who'll gladly take those leads.
Advanced lead gen owners use software such as MultiLogin along with mobile proxy farms to have hundreds of separate Chrome "entities" saved, all using different proxies, their own cookies, etc. This along with an infinite amount of other tools for call tracking, CTR manipulation, etc.
Mobile proxies have really changed the game, giving these lead gen folks an advantage. Because of the nature of mobile proxies (where multiple people can "share an IP address"), it's more difficult to detect. Since EACH GBP entity can bring in thousands/month, it's miniscule in terms of cost.
Reviews? Laughably easy to purchase and outsource, starting around $5/review. Combine this with fake Dalle images to attach to the review and/or GBP itself, and things can only get worse from here.
Google has actually begun VIDEO verification where you literally have to facetime with a Google employee to verify you own the business you say you own... even this can be gamed since any type of manual verification will be outsourced.
Oh and the real masters of this business model? Well they don't bother SELLING the leads to contractors, they will quite literally start their own company and will hire their own plumbers, electricians, concrete crews, etc to squeeze as much profit as possible.