Google Local Listings Hijacked?

August 25th, 2007 by Alan Rabinowitz

This is very unusual but it seems our Google Local listing is displaying someone else’s URLs, maybe our data was somehow misplaced, it also lists additional sites that are not ours, nor are they located in New York.

Anyone see this before? Is Google becoming an easy to hijack portal, or is one of its local suppliers having the wrong data? Their verification seems that it would make this hijack impossible, unless there are other underlying issues that we cannot see. Maybe we’re jumping the gun, but after what’s been going on with Google, this is likely to be a hijack issue as well, or a third party not properly validating Local Listings, Look at our URL and the other sites that are suppose to be located at our office. Odd…

After Dan Thies’s release of some hijacks via proxies that use flaws in the Google duplicate content filter, we are now finding other potential hijacks, or perhaps just plain old data issues.

We have seen and will have some upcoming data from other duplicate content methods that could be used as attacks as well in a future post.

[tags]google, google local, google local hijack[/tags]

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Posted in seo image    3 Comments

3 Responses to “Google Local Listings Hijacked?”

1. on 25 Aug 2007 at 12:57 pm   Dan Thies
   
   

   Wow.

   Have you done the Google Local registration? I would hope that a registered business at least wouldn't be subject to this kind of error.

2. on 25 Aug 2007 at 4:29 pm   Alan
   
   

   Hi Dan,

   Yes, I actually updated the listing about 2 months ago since I saw that spammy titles worked well. I checked it then and it was fine after my changes.

   Today I tried to fix it and went through what would appear to be good protection against trying to steal the listing. Now we will have to wait up to 4 weeks for the update to fix the URL according to the message from the telephone verification.

   -Alan

3. on 11 Sep 2007 at 10:31 pm   Google Has It All Wrong - Our Address That Is - WebProWorld
   
   

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