I realize that every once in awhile I proclaim my undying love to the big G. And every time I do I feel like a bit of a sycophant. But I really do love them.
Today I realized that some other company had created a Boat Charter Phuket listing on Google Places. All of a sudden my listing wasn't coming up anymore. Then I realized that not only had they stolen my name (granted, I could see someone else using it since none of those words are really trademarked or anything), but they were also using my logo! Which you can see below, is really just an image with my domain name. But they had a different domain name! Yet, they were coming up in all the listings where I should have been, and all of a sudden my traffic had dropped by about 40%. And to top it all off, their site is currently under construction! There's nothing even there but a splash page from their hosting company!
So I decided to report them. Wasn't sure which method to take, so I did a multi-pronged attack. First I submitted their Places listing as spam via Google Webmaster Tools. Then I reported copyright infringement on the logo since it's obviously mine. THEN I reported their business listing as inappropriate.
Well, I'm happy to say that within 5 hours I had an automated response from Webmaster Tools saying they'd received my spam report. Now, received is one thing, but when I checked out the Places link again it had all been fixed. My listing now comes up where it used to, and their site is now showing Under Construction as the only indexed content (which was obviously manually triggered by the Goog as "Under Construction" doesn't appear anywhere on their site).
Thanks Google!
UPDATE: Seems like Google kind of mashed our listings together. It's now got my website and address, but it's got their description and phone number. And I don't have the rights to edit that listing... but when I edit MY listing through the Google Places interface then click the link to view it live, it takes me to the mashed up listing. Hope this gets sorted out, but at least it's got my website so the traffic drop should stop.
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