Search Engine Tigers

It’s well known that Google Maps gets data from InfoUSA and, more recently, from business owners going in and editing their information themselves, but are they also getting that data from crawling regular websites? The short answer is ‘yes’ and ‘maybe’.

The long answer is that I’ve seen listings for small businesses in Google Maps where the website displayed for the business is that of a ‘profile page’ on an IYP site. It’s highly unlikely that these small businesses that don’t have their own websites have located their profile pages on these IYP sites (in multiple states), and submitted them as their primary websites. I also know that the IYP site didn’t go in and change the data for these advertisers to point at the IYP pages as these are sites that I have primary SEM responsibility for, and I don’t have the resources to go and add the listing for each advertiser in each phone book to Google Maps. Now as to whether it grabs other data from the website, such as address and phone number, that’s more difficult to detect, as there has to be a known difference before-hand that you can observe for a change. The advertisers that are out there now with these IYP profile pages as the primary website have the same info as in the IYP, which may mean that they always did have, or that they did change unobserved. I don’t have data on this yet, but given that I do have sites out there with metered numbers I may one day be able to say that they do (of course, I would never be able to definitively say that they don’t).

For the majority of sites with the metered numbers I am using this tip from SearchEngineGuide, and having the name, address and phone number of the business listed on one line on the bottom of the pages. It’ll be interesting to follow those that have that, and those that don’t to see if it makes a difference in getting picked up in the local search results.

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