By UPDATE: Google has not taken any action to stop spam in the keywords of businesses which is a violation of their guidelines or taken action against any of the spam listed here, but they did just suspend my business listing for having pointed it out (I’m guessing). I’ve filed an appeal and will see what they say.
The title of a business has an enormous and often times unfair impact on the rankings for a location on a specific keyword. This is not new information in the Local SEO space and has lead to bouts of spam throughout the years. Using a new tool, Local Falcon, I sought to see just how much of an impact the name of a location had on its ability to rank in Google Maps. This tool (which has a free and paid version) allows you to ‘scan’ Google Maps for how well a particular business location ranks for a keyword at various intervals of distance away from that location. The free version of this tool allows you to see a maximum of a 5 x 5 grid of rankings (or rankings at 25 different positions) within a 1 kilometer radius (0.62 miles) around the location in question. This is an invaluable tool for gauging how well a local business ranks inside of the mile radius around their location and it can help us understand the weight of different signals on the Google Local / Google Maps ranking algorithm.
On average spam in the name of a business helped that location improve by at least 9.53 ranking positions.
To measure and prove the impact I would need to be able to adjust the names of various real business listings on Google without causing any harm to a legitimate business that was operating within Google’s guidelines. Luckily I was able to find a large list of spam business listings here in the Dallas area thanks to Google Product Expert and Local SEO Jason Brown’s ReviewFraud.org. His in-depth list of businesses using the services of a fake review spammer here in our local area also included various listings with spam in their names. These business names often included pipes with keyword spam such as “Godinez Auto Repair | Oil Change | Tune Ups | Major Repairs”. All of these had been reported to Google previously for spam violations and had yet to be removed or had action taken on them by Google’s spam team. That made these listings the perfect test subjects to measure just how much of an impact the name of a business might have on their Google Local / Google Maps rankings providing visual, real evidence of the weight the business name has in the local algorithm.
The experiment parameters were simple, change the business name to the most likely actual name of the business using the ‘Suggest an Edit’ feature. The most likely name of the business was taken directly from the website in all cases where the correct business name was used either in their footer, the contact page, or in rare cases the Schema.org. My experiment would end up taking several weeks to conclude as the API which LocalFalcon uses to update their system appears to take up to several days to update and many of the businesses or their SEO were quickly reverting the names back to the spammy name in order to abuse the system for rankings. Below I’m displaying only the map portion of the screenshots taken, the full screenshots are available to other researchers upon request.
Examples of Businesses With Spam Names on Google Maps
Jee Law
Name on Google My Business: JEE LAW FIRM | DWI/DUI ATTORNEY | CRIMINAL/DEFENSE LAWYER
Most Likely Business Name: Jee Law, PLLC
Keyword examined: dallas dwi attorney
Avg Positions Lost: 10.5
Lost all local rankings: No
Before Name Change:
After Name Change:
Godinez Auto Repair
Name on Google My Business: Godinez Auto Repair | Oil Change | Tune Ups | Major Repairs
Most Likely Business Name: Godinez Auto Repair
Keyword examined: dallas oil change
Avg Positions Lost: 16.48
Lost all local rankings: Yes
Before Name Change:
After Name Change:
Dunham & Jones
Name on Google My Business: Dunham & Jones, Dallas DWI Attorneys
Most Likely Business Name: Dunham & Jones
Keyword examined: dallas dwi attorney
Avg Positions Lost: 0
Lost all local rankings: No
Before Name Change:
After Name Change:
A-EZ Out Bail Bonds
Name on Google My Business: A-EZ Out Bail Bonds Dallas
Most Likely Business Name: A-EZ Out Bail Bonds
Keyword examined: dallas bail bonds
Avg Positions Lost: 3.16
Lost all local rankings: No
Before Name Change:
After Name Change:
Skyline Realty
Name on Google My Business: Skyline Realty Firm – Real Estate Agency Plano
Most Likely Business Name: Skyline Realty
Keyword examined: plano real estate
Avg Positions Lost: Unknown
Lost all local rankings: Yes
Before Name Change:
note: this graphic file was corrupted at time of publication, I am working on restoring it right now and will update this post and the data within when I am able to do so.
After Name Change:
Dallas Media Marketing
Name on Google My Business: Dallas Media Marketing | Digital Agency | SEO | Web Design
Most Likely Business Name: Dallas Media Marketing
Keyword examined: dallas seo
Avg Positions Lost: 14
Lost all local rankings: Yes
Before Name Change:
After Name Change:
NEWMEDIA
Name on Google My Business: NEWMEDIA | Dallas SEO & Web Design
Most Likely Business Name: NEWMEDIA
Keyword examined: dallas seo
Avg Positions Lost: 13
Lost all local rankings: Yes
Before Name Change:
After Name Change:
Conclusion
As you can see all but one of the businesses lost significant portions of their location rankings in Google Maps / Google Local after their name was stripped of the keyword spam added to it. The one business who did not lose rankings was a law firm who has multiple offices that use this spammy pattern likely not knowing it is unnecessary for them to rank.
On Average when spam was removed from a local businesses name their rankings within a mile radius of their physical location dropped a whopping 9.53 positions, say that a different way, spam in the name of a business helps that location improve their local rankings by at least 9.53 positions, and possibly even more (as much as 21!).
57.14% of businesses lost 100% of their local rankings when spam keywords were removed from their business names.
Placing keyword spam in your title is also not a guarantee for instant success, though it does seem to be very helpful. Take the spam listing for the business Jee Law, this listing has 57 reviews with an average rating of 4.9 (at least some of which are likely fake according to ReviewFraud.org), instead of using their main website they built a light-weight microsite targeting both the area of law and geographical area of their location (including both in the domain name), and the website loads quickly at a total load time of 1.0s with a time to first contentful paint of 0.5s according to GTMetrix (tested from Dallas, TX). However, the website only has 3 referring domains according to Majestic (none of which are from good authoritative sources), with a Trust Flow of 13, and the website doesn’t use HTTPS or Schema.org. Yet, when the spam keywords are included in the title this website skyrockets up the local business listing charts signaling that the reviews and likely the intent of the website paired with such a title is enough to make it one of Google’s top choices for that query in that specific location. When the same query is done on Google Maps from North Dallas, a different part of the city, this law firm shows up only at position #19 even with their spam business name.
Methodology for Average Positions Lost Metric
I used LocalFalcon’s 5×5 grid with a 1 kilometer radius. This gives 25 data points of rankings for each location for the keyword specified. When a location does not rank on a keyword at a specific location the pin marker displays a #+ combination such as 17+ or 20+ signifying it scanned all available results and was unable to find the location ranking at this position. Due to this I added a 1 to the number displayed and subtracted (or added) to the number at the same position from the scan performed before the spam was removed from the business name.
All 25 changes were then added up for each location and divided by 25 to discover the Average Positions Lost metric.
The total Average Positions Lost metric cited above as 9.53 in the Conclusions section was derived by adding up all 150 data points available at the time of calculation (leaving out the Skyline Realty data due to its absence) and divided by the total of 150. This data includes the 0 changes from Dunham and Jones.
Caveats
LocalFalcon doesn’t display the full name of the business at the time of screen capture, making it more difficult to provide direct evidence of the full spam name in the imagery provided. Due to this I’ve recorded screenshots of Google Map listings and of emails from Google Maps. If you’re a researcher and interested in this data for further study it is available upon request.
Screenshots from LocalFalcon by me using the Full Page Screen Capture extension in Google Chrome