Google Local, now known officially as Google My Business, has to deal with what they call “industry spam rings”, which are plaguing Google’s local listings like a virus. And as a result, they’ve changed their internal policies in order to deal with these industry spam rings. Google is, in some cases, manually going to a location to confirm the NAP data and make sure that they serve customers at that location.

I recently met with an unidentified source who is very familiar with the inner workings at Google Local. He explained to me that Google is ver aware of “industry spam rings”. That’s the exact words that the Google employees have called this issue. The industries involved in the industry spam rings are: [Read more…]

Google added the “Irrelevant keywords” section to the sidebar of the Google Quality Guidelines. This section, called “Irrelevant keywords“, details the practice of keyword stuffing, and gives specific types of examples of where it is being used today is worth noting.

As you can see in the previous sidebar of the Google Quality Guidelines section of Google’s support, there was no page titled “Irrelevant keywords”: [Read more…]