Quality in local search directory results is extremely important because the consequences of bad local search results can be very serious for the user. This is because contact with dubious businesses or individuals found in local search brings those individuals to the user’s door – not just their computer. Consumer alerts from the Federal Trade Commission and the Better Business Bureau describe some of the issues surrounding inaccurate information in Locksmith listings that illustrate the concerns that relate to any listing that involves a serviceman being called to the door. Most reports of abuses involve over-charging or other types of consumer scams,but there could easily be more serious consequences. Recently, Google announced that they have taken steps to close loopholes that allowed unscrupulous persons to hijack the listings of real businesses, but Google watchers remain skeptical as to how well this will solve the problem.

Local search directories including Google Maps, Yahoo Local and Live Maps are rapidly overtaking more traditional ways of finding local business information. Unlike the old Yellow Pages where all information was specifically submitted and carefully verified, information in online local directories is usually listed for free and gathered from a combination of user submissions and information from other local online directories. Business owners can “claim” their listings and “correct” inaccuracies but the monitoring of this has not been very vigilant and there have been widespread reports of listing hijackings or registering of multiple accounts. In fact, when Google’s Matt Cutts called for ideas on what areas of webspam their team should tackle for 2009, map spam was the second-most popular choice (no-result search results was first).

Google Maps has been the center of much of the concern although there are issues throughout the local directory listing sector of the internet as well. Originally, Google Maps were more careful about their listings. In order to create or claim a listing in Google Maps, a business owner had to obtain a PIN number to access the listing by mail. However, this required Google to actually mail the cards to business owners and Google eventually switched to telephone verifications instead and this has turned out to be not nearly as accurate. Google supported the less strict telephone verifications with bans and/or penalties for businesses that attempted to game the results. Naturally, this only works with the more scrupulous businesses and there have been calls for Google to return to stricter verification methods for their results.

In the meantime, business owners need to be very vigilant about their listings. Local search listings should be monitored regularly (at least once a month). Ensure that all information is still valid and any duplicate listings are removed. Here is information that will help edit or remove information in Google, Yahoo and Live.com.

http://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=22043 
http://help.live.com/help.aspx?project=Local_Listing_Center&market=en-us&querytype=keyword&query=tide_CLL
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/ysm/ll/guidelines/local-01.html?terms=removing+a+local+listing
http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/local/general.html

Since these search engines also cull information from other popular local search directories, it is necessary to make sure that these are up-to-date and accurate. Probably the easiest way to check is to search for your business and review any listings that appear for accuracy. Some important local search directories to monitor include:

www.yellowpages.com
www.superpages.com
www.citysearch.com

Setting alerts with Google, Yahoo and Live.com is a good way to monitor mentions of your site automatically.

Finally, it may also be a good idea to make your customers aware of any scams that they may encounter by alerting them to the existence of the issue. One of the best weapons against phishing scams where users were diverted to phony banking or other financial websites via suspicious e-mails is customer awareness. Local search spam is similar in that hijacked local listings may be tricking your customers in much the same way. Combat map spam with awareness. If you are a member of a national organization, include this information on your site and if there are any alerts or important information about these kinds of issues in your industry or local area, link to them so your customers can be aware.

Creating unique and relevant description tag text for large dynamic sites can be a challenge. After all, if your website has 50,000 pages of products that are constantly changing, writing unique description tag text for each page would be a virtually impossible task. The time it would take to do this would be more effectively utilized elsewhere (on link building, for example). Therefore, many large websites program their sites to dynamically create unique description tag text and this is fine but there are still ways to optimize this process to make these tags the best that they can be. For example, look at these description tags from Amazon.com:

Basically, these are all the same tag with roughly this format:

A community about KEYWORD. Tag and discover new products. Share your images and discuss your questions with KEYWORD experts.

While these tags are all different, the difference is slight with the bulk of the words in the tag repeating across pages of the site. More seriously, all the tags start with the same string of characters: “A community about”.

By starting the tag with the unique key phrase “Italian cinema community”, the tags look more distinct to search engines and the key phrase is made more prominent.

To create good dynamic description tags, consider these two strategies and associated tips:

1. Create the dynamic tags according to general Best Practices for description tags:

a. Place the full key phrase being targeted to the page as close to the beginning of the page as possible.
b. Use full sentences and, if there is room, include a call to action such as Buy PRODUCT NAME HERE at my store.
c. Keep description tag text between 110 and 180 characters.
d. Avoid stuffing keywords in the description tag. Repeating keywords too many times can trigger spam filters, so it should be avoided.

2. Create unique tags for top level pages targeted to your most competitive keywords and reserve the dynamic tags for dynamic content. This is particularly important if your top level pages are short on plain text content because the description tag text may be the only content search engines can find to display in the snippet. Also, if the content of your top level pages are just lists of products, they will appear very similar to each other. A good description tag could help make the pages more distinct to search engines, increasing the chance that they will each be recognized as important and deserving of a place in the main search results pages.

If you have no way of creating unique description and keywords tags for your dynamic pages, then it is better not to have them at all. However, in that case, make sure that there is sufficient plain text descriptive content on the page, so search engines have something to display under your link in the search engine results pages.

Last week, in a rare unified move, all three major search engines announced support for a new “canonical URL tag” designed to help search engines understand a website with multiple URLs displaying the same content. Basically, all a site owner needs to do is add this tag to the head section of all versions of a duplicated page. So, for example, this tag:

By adding the canonical tag to all these potential versions of the page, it tells search engines that all these URLs are essentially the same page and should be treated as such. This allows them to easily determine which page should be listed and at the same time ensure that all the linking value for these pages is preserved and combined under one URL.

The introduction of this new tag provides an alternate way for site owners to address duplicate content issues created by the way their site is designed. Up until now, the only solution that worked for all three search engines was to restrict the access of the robots to duplicate pages using instructions in the robots.txt file, robots meta tags or both. Any website owners that have been using the robots meta tag or robots.txt file to deal with this and who decide to switch to the tag will need to remove any instructions restricting access to duplicated pages from their robots.txt files and/or remove the robots meta tags so that search engines can find the new canonical URL tags.

Unfortunately, for some websites, using the robots meta tags and robots.txt file may continue to be the only viable solution to duplicate content, because although this new tag addresses the issue of which page should be indexed, it does not resolve the crawling problem associated with duplicate URLs. Since search engine robots do not realize that these pages are all the same until after they have been crawled and indexed, they may still waste valuable crawling time accessing the same content and potentially delaying the indexing of unique content. Furthermore, all three search engines have indicated that they will view the canonical URL tag as a “suggestion” and will still be using alternate means to determine which URL should be displayed in duplicate content situations. This is why the best course of action is not to give search engine duplicate URLs in the first place and using robots.txt, robots meta tags or the canonical URL tag should only be used if there is no way to program the site to be search engine friendly.

More details about this new tag can be found here:
http://ysearchblog.com/2009/02/12/fighting-duplication-adding-more-arrows-to-your-quiver/
http://blogs.msdn.com/webmaster/archive/2009/02/12/partnering-to-help-solve-duplicate-content-issues.aspx
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html