Search for "<my area> plumber" returns totally gamed results. Has for years. No idea why that obvious use case is so broken. My wife hired one and the plumber was useless so I investigated. I've found obvious spam nests of multiple sites with duplicate styling and nothing seems to have changed.
This is lead gen and is a big business. People will build generic white label websites and rank them for certain cities. They'll then put a toll free number on them and then contact legitmate contractors and charge them either a monthly rate or a fee per each call.
There's also companies like RingPartner that are referred to Pay Per Call networks and give you a unique phone number to promote and you get paid per call.
Ah yes, the home contracting industry is ripe for SEO due to so many long tail keywords. A project I'm not proud of managed to get 100M pages indexed (about 1% of Google at the time), all related to home contracting services. This was done with a combination of using mod_rewrite to manufacture unique URLs, creating a CMS platform, hiring students to write content, using natural linking algorithms, and some software to automate creating unique inbound links from wikis/blogs to deep URLs. Sad to see the same kind of thing can be done today. I regret not putting that effort towards something more productive, but when you're in advertising, the race to the bottom can be tempting.
I've been reporting things like this for years and never seen anything change for better. I'm not saying Google doesn't care, but it seems like they cannot tell apart signal from noise so they can't fix these scams.
Something like "[myarea] open locked door" can have Google ad bids in the range of 30$,so there may be money in there for Google not caring for quality organic results
> You can have all the merits in the world, but if people don't know about it then you're out of business.
With the rise of social media, this is about 20 years out of date. If you have a great product and 100 users, 1000 people are going to see glowing testimonials at zero cost.
I strongly disagree. You're thinking purely from a software point of view - advertising is still extremely useful for any kind of local business or startup.
Good pointer but...let’s try that. My guess is they stay online. Here’s a couple minutes of searching. All the same company. Google can’t even see the dupe content obvious to us:
Google aren’t even making ad money on this. It’s just crap content and really bad old-style spam. If they just required a business location it might help.
I did. I also told a real plumber what was going on so he could report it. Now I see he's doing it too, or at least a minor version with one page per area.
