411 LOCALS FREE

Reviewers that are leaving reviews are are generally 5 and some times 4 star reviewsĨ. The websites generally only include the business name in an image rather than textħ. street view does not indicate the business is at that locationĦ. Nearly all addresses are located at or very near city centroidĥ. I have looked at about 20 sites that look the same and have found the following in common:Ĥ. Approximately 45,000 other sites are listed on the same IPģ. The two suspicious sites related to the places listings are hosted on the same IPĢ. I recently ran across some of their sites and did some detective work. Interesting that you brought these guys up. Have you run into them in any way? Have you seen their listings or spoken with previous clients? While Google is certainly aware of them and has implemented some changes at scale to mitigate their efforts, clearly they are still active. It is speculated that they have worked on 16,000 business listings and could have as many as 8000 active clients. I have spoken with several of their ex-clients (those that would speak with me as a number refused any comment) and they reported overly aggressive and threatening tactics. And LAWYERPLACENTIACA.INFO (and several of the other domains of the domains did but no longer do) resolved to 411 Locals.Ĥ11 Locals is no small actor and they are rumored to use a number of “dirty” tactics including closing competitive listings and changing descriptions just before month end with keyword heavy focus so that they showed a higher temporary ranking in client. The one that didn’t was clearly not located where the business listing indicated. Most of those forwarded to the same unanswered cell phone message. I can not say with 100% assurance that all of these are from 411 Locals but I called the first 4 or 5 on the list.

411 LOCALS FREE

Poster HoskinsRick noted a range of examples of spamming that shared a number of features keyword laden business names, either superpages or keyword focused domains, Place Page updates that referenced the address or domain name, plenty of fake reviews, royalty free photos and spot-on centroid locations:

Well they are back in the forums with this recent report of their widespread spam. 411 Locals has been implicated in widespread Places listing sabotage and accused of threatening an SMB.

411 locals