The unofficial Google motto for the longest time has been “don’t be evil”. It’s a laudable goal and one that they have done a pretty good job of living up to for many years. However, there is one glaring hole in their shinny armor where evil is in danger of oozing in. We are a local SEO company focused on getting small businesses found in the search engines at a price they can afford. The Google Local Business Center allows local businesses to adopt their listing for free, it’s a community service where millions of happy, honest, fluffy, and well behaved local businesses update their own listings so that all the world can find them.

Google has opened a way for large companies with lots of offices to enter and manage their own information but beyond that small business are pretty much on their own. One of the more unpleasant side effects of this laissez faireapproach is that business of the less friendly and fluffy kind can in fact easily adopt competitors listings in an attempt to drive customers to them by fraud. There was a recent case in Australia where a florist was convicted of doing just this and received a fine and a bunch of community service time. Google claimed they were “shocked just shocked” to hear of such underhand and hard to predict behavior. That is a little hard to swallow as we come across it all the time.

The simple solution would be for Google to allow companies (or their agents like us) to adopt their listings and lock them through a verifiable and traceable approach…like…hummm…let’s see…how about a credit card! It doesn’t even have to be charged…but it would at least deter the casual scoundrel. Without some form of suitable security the LBC will remain vulnerable to abuse. Of course one way to absolutely secure your listing is to join the LBC advertising program and pay for your listing to be featured for local queries…but making business do that by making the rest of the LBC chaotic would be evil wouldn’t it?