As #mancseo is having its regular monthly night at the Black Dog Ballroom on April 28th, it makes good sense to hold the inagural #womancseo in conjunction. So, for any females working in Search in Manchester (or who happen to be in Manchester on the 28th), we’ll be in Walrus (@walrusbar) beforehand for a more sophisticated cocktail or two.
Someone should be there for 5:30 or 6pm.
Once upon a time, when you searched for “Manchester SEO” or “SEO Manchester” you received a 10-box local listing. It was not, perhaps, of the best quality as SEO firms tend to be competitive, but as everybody was doing it slightly against the rules, there was a level playing field.
Then Google decided to banish local listings on SEO-related SERPs. Sometime shortly after that, the local result for the two searches above reappeared – with only one business showing.
'Manchester SEO' - the only SEO business in Manchester
The problem is that this one listing is for an agency of dubious repute, doing everything wrong – yet the numerous high-quality SEO agencies in Manchester, with Places pages adhering to Google’s TOS are still being frozen out.
Intelligent Business Solutions homepage isn't even finished.
Let’s look at the Places listing itself:
The business name in Places doesn't match the actual business name.
Despite Google insisting that businesses should use their real business name on their Places page rather than using keywords, this business is clearly getting away with keyword spam on their listing.
The owner has rated his own company - bumping up his ratings.
This business owner has also given himself a 5 star rating while responding to negative criticism, thereby bumping up his own ratings. I’ve reported this as spam myself, but Google has taken no action.
Reviews that are clearly fake - they sound the same and are incoherent.
Then, if you look further at the reviews you find these two gems – incoherent reviews talking about ‘Optimisations’. Both sound like they were written by the same person. As someone who moderated reviews at a large consumer review website for 3 years, I would, in my professional opinion, guess that these reviews are fake, either paid for by the business owner from one of the less-than-salubrious services available for such activities or added by the business’ own outsourced SEO team.
Either way, this Places listing pretty much has everything that a Places listing shouldn’t have in order to offer legitimate information and advice to searchers.
So, why has Google left this listing here?
Well, the paranoid voice in my head tells me that maybe Google is aware of the poor quality of the local results for this SERP (and other SEO-related SERPs) and they’re trying to teach us all a lesson about what spam does to harm legitimate businesses who aren’t breaking the rules.
Maybe Google wants us to feel a small amount of the frustration that business-owners feel when they see SERPs taken over by poor-quality content spam or businesses trying to game the listings using black hat link building tactics.
I mean, Google could be broken, just on SEO queries, but somehow I doubt it.
#womancseo was setup as reaction to the altogether too male-driven beast that is #mancseo so the women working in the search marketing industry in Manchester have a networking event where they don’t have to endure football talk, wrestling, or the general smelliness of male SEOs.
We’re not really sure how we’re going to use this domain yet, but it won’t be for endless top 10 lists and rehashes of stuff that you’ve already read 13 times on Search Engine Land and SEO Moz, so any suggestions, or even submissions, are welcome.
The first #womancseo will be announced shortly.
Cheers.
