Local SEO Practice: Creating a Fictitious Business?

[sweetfancymoses]

Has anyone tried fabricating a fake, brick-and-mortar store as an SEO experiment? Sort of along the lines of what Starwood is doing (check out this Wikipedia experiment with the Test Galaxy Sheraton), but with a legitimate physical address and all?

Was it useful?  And are there any potential legal troubles that could arise from borrowing a vacant address?

I'm thinking this could be helpful for my Intern to gain practical experience in local SEO, without the politics of working for a client  But I wouldn't want to blight that address for future occupants if the experiment went horribly awry.

We could instead offer pro bono services to a small business with a limited web presence – that would be useful to her, and constructive.  But I'd like to have a better understanding of what signals Google looks for when deciding whether to index a website in local search, and see whether possible to dupe those algos.

What are your thoughts, Mozzers?

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[sweetfancymoses]

Duplicate post, sorry!

[sweetfancymoses]

Thanks for your input, Keri!  I think we're going to go the pro bono route.

Starwood's a curious case, and I also wonder to what extent those pages exist for SEO reasons.  Some of their test properties look innocuous, like sandboxes for translation plug-ins or new templates, but the Wikipedia citation on the 'List of New York Hotels' is really interesting to me.  When I was working in-house for a New York hotel chain, I also picked up on weird affinities between that page and rankings in local search.  Back in May I noticed that the Magic 7 for "NYC Hotels" exclusively listed hotels with Wikipedia pages, and decided to create one for one of the properties.  Bingo!  Within a few weeks, we were usually among the top local results for "nyc luxury hotels", "nyc 4-star hotels", and "nyc 5-star hotels" (yeesh, Google, it's either one or the other...)

At the same time, hotels with Wikipedia pages started receiving snippets and thumbnails from their articles on the far right of the screen, adjacent to the map.  This seemed to be exclusive to the hospitality vertical, and I didn't notice the same SERP formatting in other cities.  You would also see thumbnails of related hotels (which as a rule, also had Wikipedia pages), and a list of features that it seemed to be cross-referencing from multiple sources, like:

Hotel Class: 4 Stars

Architect: Steven Jacobs

Style: Modernist

My hunch is that Starwood was testing two hypotheses with the Test Galaxy Sheraton:

1. Does inclusion on Wikipedia's list of hotels in New York City influence rankings, either local or web?
2. Does Google source a hotel's 'features' from lists and structured mark-ups on a hotel's own website?

In any case, Google did away with the Wikipedia-heavy SERPs a few months ago but I suspect it continues to inform local search.  It makes sense from a business perspective that Google would want to use use open-source data whenever possible.  They could crunch its geocoordinates and  with their algorithms without paying license fees, I would think, no?

[KeriMorgret]

I'd totally avoid doing anything like this as well, and think that offering pro bono services would be much better all the way around.

My guess is that Starwood didn't realize that those URLs were live and indexable on the web. I must say that http://www.starwoodhotels.com/preferredguest/property/features/attraction_detail.html?propertyID=588&attractionId=1000027215 provided my ROFL of the morning though!

[sweetfancymoses]

Think I needed this, Daniel.  Thank you!

My conscience says that you're right.  I've gone back and forth on this today, and whatever educational value there might be seems outweighed by the potential to confuse people and affect livelihoods.

There are things that I'd like to test that go beyond the standard on-page/off-page process of citations, schemata, and KML—things like EXIF data, geocaching, and Wikipedia mentions—but it doesn't seem fair to test any of them without having some skin in the game.

Ah, if only there were a sandbox for real company stuff...

[DanielFreedman]

Yikes!

No, no, no.

A thousand times no.

And once again: no.

Fakery is always and everywhere wrong. It's not complicated.

If that means nothing to you, consider the consequences of exposure.

As a former TV news director I can assure you this is a helluva story:

"Company in the sleazy SEO business is caught red-handed in the cynically calculated use of deceit to intentionally mislead the public by creating a fake  business; calls it an "intern experiment" and says it did nothing wrong. Consumer advocates disagree and call for regulation and licensing of SEO industry. Part two tomorrow, as our series on the death of privacy and birth of web big brotherism continues. Are your children safe?"

Sheesh.

Few issues are black and white.

But this is one.

[Zachary_Russell]

Thanks,

Let me know what you think of my post, I am trying to start establishing myself in the blogosphere, though that particular post is really is a high-level recap of Search Love, though I had a lot of points made in David Mihms Presentation, which was amazing.

In response to the local algos, they seem to be, in my opinion, even more neurotic than the organic ones. I mean they are ALL over the place, it is also VERY hard to track local rankings.

[NakulGoyal]

I agree with Zach and I would suggest going with the other option you already have in your head.

"We could instead offer pro bono services to a small business with a limited web presence – that would be useful to her, and constructive.  But I'd like to have a better understanding of what signals Google looks for when deciding whether to index a website in local search, and see whether possible to dupe those algos."

In my opinion, that's the best way to go. @Zach, thanks for posting those links. I will check out your post.

[Zachary_Russell]

You'd be treading in some murky water there. I had a conversation last week at SearchLove Boston with David Mihm, one of the most reputable local SEOs, and we had a conversation about creating fictitious addresses for businesses, the problem is that you cannot use a PO box, which leaves you to use things like UPS store mailboxes. Google can obviously tell that if your at a UPS Store and will take it down; David Mihm explained it as a Wack-A-Mole game.

Also, if you use fictitious addresses, what stops competitors from reporting you? Again, you could try it, but it's real tricky to do, and successfully get away with. I'm much more of a fan of #RCS.

Some good resources to learn from

getlisted.org

davidmihm.com

http://protechig.com/seo/search-love-boston-2012-takeaways/ (not to toot my own horn, but I have a good amount of local tips in this post)

Hope this helps!

Zach