With merely a bad service or product, we might push for a discount or refund, and write some negative reviews about a company at various ratings sites like Yelp. But, when it’s an actual scam artist, it becomes a question of how to reach them in the first place, and then how to do anything that they’d even feel.

In the local search marketing world, many of us have noticed a spate of bad actors who are setting up fraudulent business listings (perhaps even operating under bogus names), and once they’ve lured people into doing business with them, they abscond with fees in return for shoddy service or no service/product whatsoever. So, there are some basic issues around how they are operating with impunity, promoting themselves online (sometimes out-ranking bona fide established local businesses), and then taking consumers’ money with zero accountability.

So, here are some tips we’ve made to help you REACH LOCAL SCAM ARTISTS and even thwack ‘em!  You may not be able to get your lost time and money back, but you may get a little justice or you might be able to declaw these bad guys just a bit so they can’t prey on other consumers as easily.

Tips To Reach Local Scam Artists & Thwack ‘Em:

• Get them de-listed! Is it a bogus local listing in a directory or search engine? In other words, if you drove up to the street address they’re listed under, is there an actual company office there where you can talk to an employee of the business? Bogus listings have been a dire problem where some services like locksmiths are concerned. If there’s no business representative at the place where their online address is listed in Google Maps, Bing Maps, Yellowpages.com, Superpages.com, etc — then, that is a bogus listing. For these cases, contact the search engine or directory site and inform them that it’s a bogus listing.
• Narc on ‘em! If someone is dishonest in one thing, chances are they may be doing other bad stuff, too! Look critically at their website — are they using someone else’s copyrighted text or images? If so, inform the people they’ve lifted content from, and this could get their sites delisted from search engines like Google if it’s reported properly.  The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (or “DMCA” law) allows owners of copyrighted material to demand that sites take down content which has been taken from them.
• Reveal who they are! In times past, all sorts of conmen would set up websites pretending to be someone they weren’t. But, people can’t always hide behind a webpage any more — you should familiarize yourself with looking up domain name registration information. The URL domain name of the website of a scam company might, just might, let you discover the name of the person who set up the business. You can look the URL domain name owner information up at many different “WHOIS” services out there, although I prefer the Domain Dossier provided at Hexillion’s Central Ops. Go there, type the domain name (“example.com”) of the bad company into the search box, then hit return. Under the Domain Whois record, see who it is that is listed under the Registrant information. In some cases, the bad guys will have obscured the info by using some front company to hide who they are. Even so, you can see who is providing the domain registration service for them, and you could use that info to contact them through an attorney’s note and demand that they tell you who is behind a site so that you know who you’re dealing with.
• Complain to their website host! The Domain Dossier also reveals where the website is being hosted. Using this, you can figure out who their ISP (“Internet Service Provider”) is, and you can call them up and complain that the website is fraudulent/criminal. Some ISPs may then determine that the scam company has broken their terms and conditions, and this might result in them pulling the plug on the scam website.
• Check out the IP address of their website’s domain, too! Websites are often co-hosted on a server along with many other websites, so if you search to find out what other domain names may be associated with the same IP address, you might discover other sites and other businesses that the scam artist may be using as a front. Tread carefully with this, though, because they could just be using cheap hosting, and other domains on the same IP address may be completely unrelated to your bad guy.
• Reverse search on the web and in local search engines by the company’s phone number. This may further reveal other businesses that the bad actor is using to take advantage of people.
• Discover the business owner through the local tax office. In many localities, con men obscure their identities through using “doing business as” or “DBA” names, and these may be required to be registered with local tax offices in order for bank accounts to be set up. Contact local tax offices to see what they have filed on business names in order to help you reveal the persons responsible.
• Thwack ‘em with negative reviews! Be sure to rate them negatively in Google Maps, online yellow pages, Yelp, and at the Better Business Bureau. When searching for their type of business or by their business name, carefully look at what pages and sites are ranking. Any page which lists this business might be an opportunity for you to go in and disclose how they treated you and what your experience with them was. In one widely-reported, egregious case, a reprehensible online merchant received numerous bad reviews online, resulting in coverage in an article on the New York Times, and ultimately the owner was arrested and will likely face criminal charges.
• Blog about ‘em! If you already have a blog, write a post with the title begining with the bad business’s name and describe your interactions with them. Honest description of what they did to you could really hurt their bottom line! There are many cases out there of how individual bloggers have taken even major corporations to task, resulting in serious impacts to a company’s business.
• Report them to the authorities! If what they did to you was illegal, report the company to your local district attorney’s office, and to the state attorney general. Ask your local police for suggestions, and report the company wherever they may be operating.
• Take away their phones! In some cases we know of, locals complained to the phone company about a local scam artist that set up multiple, bogus online listings for their business, and the consumer complaints resulted in the bad guys losing their phone numbers. The phone company might be a good resource for getting info on the real names of owners behind the scam company, too.
• Take ‘em to small claims court! Assuming your total dollar amount isn’t too big, file suit against them in small claims court. You might not be able to get them to show up, or even pay, but it can be useful to you if you go through the process to get a judgement against them. You’ll need to’ve found a way to indentify the true company or individual’s name behind the scam company already, though.
• Form a mob! Know others targeted by the same scam artists? Get them to join you in reporting the offenses. There’s not only safety in numbers, but believability and priority. If enough people report the same company, it becomes progressively harder for the complaints to be ignored or neglected.

Using these tips should help you to actually reach the local scam artists, and thwack ‘em where it hurts!

If you have additional ideas for thwacking the bad guys, please add them below in the comments.

The new features might also reveal some secrets of Google Maps ranking factors. It’s definitely a space that’s well worth watching for local search marketing experts.

Google has modified the tool over time, and one of the great additions was the ability to see the monthly demand via a small little bar chart. This can be very useful for factoring in seasonality or growing demand for certain phrases. Wrapping your head around the actual numerical data is a bit more challenging. The Local number is just for the most recent month while the Global number is a monthly average. This is further complicated in that the Global number includes the world essentially while the Local number may factor in your campaign settings and locality (based on your AdWords campaign configuration).

To help tighten up data and provide a little more insight into the Local numbers, I just released an Excel spreadsheet that can take your Google Keyword Tool’s export and annualize the Local demand numbers. In some cases, this may dramatically change the order of importance of keywords to target.

Best of all, this tool is free to use so give it a play. The link below will take you to the download page for the tool as well as more detail about how it works and an example.

Google Keyword Tool Annualizer

You can use a Firefox or Internet Explorer browser both of which are compatible with the Google toolbar. You also need a Gmail account with which your comments can be associated.

The sidewiki panel that appears on a website will be displayed to users with the toolbar installed. It is a separate window that appears to the left of your browser. All the comments displayed are stored on Google servers.

This annotation of the web through the sidwiki pane on any website is not owned by a site owner. It is activated by a program that users install on their computers of their own volition.

The disconcerting fact is that when visitors arrive at your site by either typing in your website address or clicking a link that points to your site, they can see comments on the side of your site.

There is no separate URL on the sidewiki panel that shows the source of the comments. They look like part of your site. It cannot be taken for granted that all users know the concept behind sidewiki even if they have willingly installed it on their computers. The comments beside your site can lead to users assuming that it is part of your site.

Unlike your blog on your site where you can moderate the comments, in the case of sidewiki, as the site owner, you have no control over the comments that appear beside your site.

The Google moderation team will ensure that damaging comments will be prevented from getting published. But there is no guarantee on this. As Matt Cutts always states, it is the intent which Google has a close look at (behind any strategy or move by webmasters). In this case, it may not be truly relevant as malicious competitors can hold the key to the comments and the site owner cannot do anything about it.

If visitors to your site were to see offensive comments on the sidewiki panel that fly under the moderation team’s radar, it can reflect badly on your site and can stop repeat visits after that experience.

Consider the example where you search on Google for the term “sidewiki controversy” (without the quotes). Have a look at the second result on the Google SERPs in the screenshot below.

The link below the second SERP result clearly shows the Google domain as the URL. On clicking the link, you are taken to a wikipedia page titled Vaccine Controversy. You can see that the comment on the Sidewiki panel has been indexed by Google and displayed on the Google SERPS. The highlighted portion on the screenshot below (click to enlarge the image) matches the second result on the Google SERPs in the screenshot above this.

If sidewiki comments can influence search engine rankings, then that is a matter of worry too as your competitors can leverage it to their advantage by posting comments that are contextual to the content on your site and get your site ranked for search terms with negative intent.

Google might possibly consider the aspect of monetizing the comments made on sidewiki panel through contextual advertisements in future. These can confound the web landscape further as ads placed can be contextual to the comments made that in turn corroborate with the content of the site on which the sidewiki panel is displayed.

With commercial sites selling products or services, an ad with an affiliate link in direct competition to the site on whose left side it is displayed can become a classic case of riding piggyback on some site owner’s hard work.

I am certain Google will take precautions to counter these possible ill effects. Maybe an idea would be to exclude websites with commercial intent from this sidewiki feature to start with. Once the system is ascertained to be foolproof in the non commercial space, then it can be slowly introduced to include commercial sites.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland ppc services provider that offers both seo and ppc services to its clients in New Zealand and Australia.

A recent survey by Hitwise in February 2009 shows Google Image Search as part of the troika of top web properties owned by Google in terms of traffic and revenue.

Peter’s responses to Eric’s questions are summarised as follows:

1) On Page Factors in Optimising Images:
In web search, the bots crawl structured data, have enough signals like title, headings and sub-headings, the body content, the backlinks and anchor text from external sources etc to size up the intent of the page.

An image search does not have such signals to rely upon. The bot can access the image source tag in the html and the alt text describing what the image both of which are the key determinants. The more clarity the alt tag content has, the better the intent conveyed to the crawlers.

Peter affirms that it is a very good practice to have a clear description of what the image is about in the alt text. For users who are vision impaired or who have images turned off, the alt text clearly conveys the message when the mouse is hovered over the image. It is a bonus if the same alt text is found elsewhere on the page content in the form of the title of the image or part of a caption.

From the crawler’s point of view, it can see the image tag and the alt text but these do not say much about the image itself. Naming parts of the image as in Flickr photos also does not help the crawlers as it is not machine readable.

If the title, description and caption of the image is obvious to the user, Peter says this is a huge help in helping his team figure out the text associated with that image and rank it appropriately.

File name is an important attribute that is analysed as it tags on to the image even if it is embedded many times on a page or if it is linked to by other sites. A meaningful file name helps though it is not a very strong signal in the ranking process.

A few issues related to file names are:

• A lot of operating systems and web servers do not allow file names in other languages that cannot be represented in ASCII. People cannot use certain types of text when naming the file for the same reason.
• Another problem from the human perspecitve is that users cannot do justice when naming the file in their respective language. So the search engines cannot assume that the filename is the best description of the image.

2) The Alt Text:
Peter says that if the image cannot be seen but one can perceive what it looks like, then the alt text should reflect that perception in words. The alt text becomes a replacement for the unseen image.

There is no hard and fast rule on the length of the alt text. It all boils down to how the user would feel about it. The alt text can be as detailed as describing all the details of the image. Peter mentions that having a title, caption and description for the image somewhere on the web page enables the crawlers to treat the image title with the same importance as the equivalent of the HTML page title for that page.

Eric poses a question about the association of caption text with the image by the crawler with an example of Charlie Chaplin dancing in the moonlight with the page content including title tag focused on the same topic. Peter confirms by saying that the association is important to the extent to which the image itself is very important to the page.

The close contextual matching of content to this image is a very strong signal. If the image was removed from that focused page, then it would lose a lot of its value in ranking terms. The key here is to think of it from the user’s perspective. If a user lands on the page on Chaplin and sees a large image of Charlie above the fold, the user can see the relevance straightaway.

If the page has six different sub topics and matching images for each sub topic as in the case of a blog about San Francisco with different posts about the place, Peter says the crawlers are pretty good at figuring out the different topics and the images relevant to each sub topic.

Having a permalink for each of the sub-topics is a big help. A canonical tag on each of the inner pages that contains the detailed post and relevant images also helps the crawlers know the canonical url for the image.

3) Matching An Image And Its Content:
There are a number of ways in which a crawler tries to figure out what an image is about, the content and how it matches the intent of a user search. Machines find it a problem to read what an image is and decipher what it represents.

Peter cites an example of an image showing a shark jumping over the Golden Gate bridge. To humans, the scenario is very obvious. The caption of the image says – Check this out. This does not make any sense to a crawler in figuring out what the image is about unless the pixels of the image are analysed. All the other factors discussed above do add to the confidence level of the image aiding the image search team in trying to figure out the image correctly.

4) Signals In Two Dimensional HTML World Vs Three Dimensional Image World:
Eric mentions the two dimensions of relevance and importance (in the form of backlinks) in the HTML world that are important signals on the page. But in image search, apart from the relevance and importance, the third factor of confidence comes into play.

Peter agrees wholeheartedly and says that unlike external links to a page that are counted as votes in web search, images are seldom linked that way. The search team has to consider the other signals to see if they are talking about the image and appropriately factor them into the algorithm.

5) Web Page Influencing the Ranking of Images:
Peter admits that a web page is certainly a signal in the ranking of images. In a nutshell, from the SEO perspective for image search, all the rules that apply to web serach apply equally in image search also. Being an authority on a certain topic and embellishing the page with unique content all provide signals that help the image as well.

So a page with great content and links from other sites to it and other positivbe external signals associated with it inherently passes on the benefits to images that reside on the page.

For images being above the fold or scattered on a page, Peter says that the user experience is a very important factor. If images add to the relevancy and usefulness of the user experience, then it is a vital factor in conjunction with other signals to return this page in the results. This relevance also proves to users that the results for an image search are very relevant to the user’s query and approved by Google to direct the user to the site.

The image search team try to return the best possible images for queries. It must be remembered that there are lots of sites with competing images that are relevant to the user queries.

6) Difference in Results Between Universal Search and Image Search:
Peter and his team realise that there is a subtle difference in intent of a search query made on web search and specifically on images.google.com for an image search. Users doing a specific image search are definitely looking for image results. It is not the case with universal search though relevant results from different verticals are presented on the SERPs. The intent may differ based on the web property the users perform a search.

7) Combating Spam in Image Search:
The image search inherits all the benefits of the work done by the Google web spam team. All the good practices that apply to web search pretty much apply to image search also.

8.Growth of Image Search and Related Technology:
Peter agrees that image search is a really hot and developing web property with incredible scope for the future. It could end up amassing trillions of images in time to come. It is a huge task indexing and organizing the unique images in the explosively growing image world. Each person’s view of the world is unique and it is reflected in the creation of images.

Peter asks a most interesting question – If someone is interested in seeing only an image, why should the search start with a text query? The solution to this has arrived in the form of the Similar Images launch, a Google Labs project where users can search for images based on existing images. The search is completely visual.

A query like Paris can return results on Paris Hilton, Paris in France, Paris in Texas and the Eiffel Tower in a good search engine. With Similar Images, you can start off with an image and take it as an additional query in your exploration along with the original text query. The image at that point is used as the next query.

With the fall in prices for good quality digital cameras and increasing quality of mobile phone cameras, taking pictures has never been easier and so very affordable. The technological advances in facial recognition software (an aspect of it is used in Google’s Picassa tool) is also helping the image search team in their quest to organize the image world to give it more purpose and a huge reach in the future.

The entire transcript of the interview on Google Image Search that forms the basis of this post makes an interesting read.

Ravi Venkatesan is a senior SEO consultant at Netconcepts, an Auckland search engine optimisation company that offers great SEO services to its clients based in New Zealand and Australia.

With the advent of Rich Snippets in SERPs, I think I can safely declare that Microformats have now hit mainstream! Google is now presenting listings of pages with hReview microformat with slightly more attention-getting “bling”:

This will undoubtedly result in slightly higher clickthrough rates for those listings.

Any day, Google could add in special display treatments for pages that sport hCard or hCalendar microformatting, so companies that haven’t implemented these simple, semantic mark-up protocols will have missed the bus!

Be sure to check out Alan Rimm-Kaufman’s blog post on how Google Rich Snippets may soon give advantage to pages coded with hProduct microformat — internet retailers should pay attention. (As a side note, I previously helped some lucky internet retailer 500 sites optimize their store locators by adding hCard Microformats through GravityStream, back when I still worked for Netconcepts — so, at least a few IR 500 sites have enjoyed Microformatting before!)

Yet, a great many sites continue to miss this vital key to relevance, and they wonder why they fail at ranking for their most apropos keywords. Keywords for which they’d otherwise have a very good chance at ranking upon!

W3C calls the TITLE the “most important element of a quality web page”

Yesterday I reviewed another major retailer website which had their brandname embedded in their page titles — and nothing else. Thousands of product pages all had identical TITLEs! This company could’ve had top three rankings on a great many competitive keyword phrases had they only customized their TITLE tags very slightly.

The W3C calls the <TITLE> tag “the most important element of a quality Web page.” Google has apparently paid attention to that, and all of the search engines have placed especial weighting upon the words found within page titles when evaluating the topics for which a webpage is associated.

It makes sense, when you think about it. A title should be a super-concentrated blurb that tells a user what a page is all about. In search engines, the title is often also displayed as the link text for each of the pages listed in the search engine results page listings. Informative titles appearing in SERP listings will get clicked upon more as users are reassured that the page they’re clicking upon is what they’re actually seeking. A page with an informative title will get clicked upon far more likely than a vague or unrelated page title.

I heard Googler Amanda Camp once mention that she’d recommended to a friend of hers to customized a page title, focusing it upon the main topic keywords for the webpage, and it immediately began ranking in the very first position for the keyword phrase.

And, I’ve seen it many times myself — engineer a good, simple, appropriate, keyword-rich title tag, and your page can  zoom its way above all the other nonoptimal page listings for the very same term.

After returning, one of my friends saw my pics and remarked that Vint Cerf resembled the Architect character in the Matrix movies. It immediately struck me that he was right — so I knocked together a comparison pic:

Vint Cerf and the Architect in the Matrix share a number of feature similarities: similar age, dress, coloring, and facial hair. The biggest difference is that the Architect has a full head of hair while Vint is balding.

In the last two films in the trilogy where the Architect appears, the character is portrayed by Helmut Bakaitis.

Further underscoring the resemblance, the Architect in the Matrix is depicted seated in an armchair during the pivotal scene when he’s introduced, and Vint Cerf was seated on stage with Chris Sherman during the SMX Keynote:

As I recall, Cerf was not obsessively clicking a Bic pen the entire time he spoke with Chris Sherman, though.

Okay, I’m not the first to mention this resemblance — TotallyLooksLike mentioned it as well, along with a few others.

I wonder, could the Wachowski Brothers who wrote and directed the films have been somehow inspired by Vint Cerf when they created the Architect? I see that a number of others out there have mentioned Cerf in relation to the character, but no direct proof that the Wachowski’s knew who he was, much less based a character in whole or in part upon him.

Okay, am I a total geek airhead for posting this?

(click to enlarge)

Apparently this Russian town got a crowd of people to don yellow slickers and stand in a large smiley face pattern so that Google Earth and Google Maps could capture them in their next update.

Trick is, the Google Map screen-grab appears to be a very obvious hoax by a blogger dubbed “Heiner Wolf“. According to these photos, people really did turn out to form the smiley face — I would guess as part of a radio station promotion. But this blogger transposed the people onto the Google Maps image of the area. Lame!

There are plenty of instances of messages appearing in Google Maps pics, if you want to see real ones: examples of roof ads, cool things in Google Maps, marriage proposals, and the infamous Swastika Building.

Assumably the special icon is celebrating Google’s 10th Birthday, though there’s no mention of it on the Google Lat Long Blog.