#LGCTM Prevention: Watch That Dirty Trail You Leave Behind

[JeroenM]

As we move around in both the real world and in the digital world, Google is following our “footsteps” by tracking us.

All too eager to make us contribute more, Google Maps encourages Local Guides to rate and review places by presenting us with a list of locations and websites that we visited recently. This is where things get sticky.

Not all places that you walked past or drove past, merit as a place that you should write a first-hand experience about and/or give a star rating. In addition, we normally only rate and review places that we have actually visited as a customer in the real world.

Unfortunately, some Local Guides seem to take suggestions by Google Maps mentioned under the Contribute tab inside the app as a (must) To-Do list. Besides the inaccuracies of our Maps time-line, it seems that people are getting confused that we now should also rate and review websites that we have visited!

Don’t be fooled by the over-eager marketing attempts that are there to help us remember all potential businesses that we may be able to review.

Yes, I visited the above website, but I had no other interaction than looking at their website and I am pretty sure that Google Maps is not looking for my opinion about their website.

Fortunately, I have not noticed that all business websites that I visited and took time to fully read, ended up on my Contribute tab.

My hypothesis:
I suspect, that Google My Business (GMB) was looking for a way to encourage us to write reviews about businesses that could be Service Area Businesses (SAB). These are legit businesses that rather than having a physical place that you can visit with a storefront, can be contacted and a representative of this business comes to you.

A great example of a typical SAB business is a plumber. Here is an example of such a SAB business on Google Maps (the way it supposes to look like). You will notice that the info card for this business has no address and instead of a Map Pointer, there is a vector area marked where this business operates.

source

You will also notice that these SAB businesses can be rated and reviewed. Since Google ain’t able to track any GPS coordinates that tell Google Maps that we perhaps did business with the plumber, it is my guess that they (GMB) are hoping to generate some reviews by concluding potential business-customer relationships by our website visits…

Conclusion - The Contribute Suggest List Is Not Clean:
As we move around in both the real world and the virtual world, the trail that we leave behind (as listed on our Google Maps Contribute tab) is dirty! There are often “footprints” there that do not belong. We should also not forget the official contribution rules, the Contribute tab is there to remind us of possibilities, not confirmed places or businesses we could legitimately rate and review.

These rules are (in my own words):

• Only contribute data to Google Maps that is relevant in the context/scope of the POI and Maps application;
• Only rate and review places or SAB businesses that you actually (first-hand) interacted with as a customer.

Having encountered a place or business is not the same as experiencing what the place or business was intended for. In other words, when walking past the shop, but not entering the shop and thus not “experiencing” the shop, it makes the (distant) observation of the shop incomplete and most often not relevant. So yes, maybe you were there, but don’t feel it necessary to fulfill the suggested task in particular if you would be breaking the contribution rules!

[MariaNgo]

@JeroenM I was not aware of the SAB option. Thnx for that new info.

And yes I have to ignore quite frequently the overly helpful suggestions to contribute reviews by Google Maps.

[MortenCopenhagen]

It is possible to turn these notifications off. I did that a long time ago. I found them quite annoying.

Was your point to remind local guides only to review places they have done business with or visited in real life, @JeroenM ?

Cheers

[Lily_Asongfac]

This is a very useful piece of information @JeroenM . We as Local Guides should have the decency to provide only accurate informations and ofcourse these info can only be given after an experience. Just passing by a place doesnt make us right enough too write down reviews, but since it is also very tempting when google suggest that we rate such places, I will fully highlight your rules. Thank you for the great and Educative writeup

[JeroenM]

@MariaNgo
SAB listings can only be achieved through the GMB program. We can still suggest edits to them though, but we cannot add them.
They only show up in Search Results when they don’t have a public store-front.

[JeroenM]

@MortenCopenhagen

Are you saying that when you go to your Contribute tab that it is completely empty? I was not talking about the phone notifications that can indeed be switched off. I am not aware or if I was at some point have forgotten that one can stop contribute suggestions altogether.

With regards to your question, I hope that my article makes people aware of several points, the one you mentioned being the most important one to keep our maps clean. However, other relevant points include:

• The Contribute list is not clean, its list includes places that you should not rate or review.
• It talks about the website visits that are now listed as places one could review and how I think this information should be interpreted and why I think it is there in the first place.
• It opens our eyes that there may be SAB businesses we could contribute towards and earn points for, that need to be searched to find them on Google Maps.
• It highlights the fact that Google’s attempts to make us contribute, can be easily misunderstood and result in bad practices that lead to both a dirty map and potential suspension…

[JeroenM]

Thank you @Lily_Asongfac for your feedback. You got the core of my message! Don’t be tempted by poor suggestions from Google and take these suggestions for what they are: possibilities not opportunities!

[MortenCopenhagen]

Hi @JeroenM ,

I thought you were referring to the notifications on mobile. Since I think they are the most invasive and annoying encouragement we get to review places we haven’t really been to. Sorry about my mistake.

Having the notifications turned off does not remove the many places we need to scroll pass under Your Contribution to get to Check the facts, Uncover missing info and Answer questions.

I was wondering why you included the information on Service Area Businesses in this post, and I thought your title and post could be more focussed if it was only about how the prompts to review very easily can be misunderstood and result in bad practices. The info on Service Area Businesses surely is worth a separate informative post.

Feel free to ignore these comments.

All the best

[JeroenM]

Thank you @MortenCopenhagen for clarifying that your Contribute tab is also not clean. Of course, those annoying phone notifications by the app are totally related to this topic. So, no need to apologize for mentioning them here.

You are absolutely right that a #LGCTM Tip about searching for SAB businesses as they may still have wrong phone numbers or opening hours, would be worthy of a stand-alone post and that is not what this post is about. I happily leave that to another LGCTM participant to do.

My trigger to write this particular post was actually a conversation that you had on Facebook with @JacquelineB about the misleading website visits that are now listed as suggestions to review under the Contribute tab. My initial thought was to write a critical feedback type of post why I think this is bad and leads indeed to undesirable practices. However, whilst looking into this, I asked myself the question “Why” would Google add these websites to our tracked trail in the first place? The presented SAB hypothesis was my answer and since not many Local Guides are informed about them, I included the explanation of what they are. Part of the aim of this informative post is to make people think, analyze and to better understand how to interpret the contribute suggestions by Google.

I could indeed have left the SAB hypothesis part out and keep my article more focused, but the question of why these websites are suggested as a reason to review these businesses would still be there. Rather than giving that hypothesis in the comments, I decided to include it in the article. That was indeed a choice I made. I would also describe this post more as an informative (loaded) commentary rather than a tutorial and thus no need to be concise.

The title of my post is a play of words on the fact that Google shows this dirty trail on our time-line and the word prevention suggests the warning to be attentive and preludes to the message not to be tempted by poor Google suggestions. The title, although factual as a metaphor is also loaded because of the word “dirty”.

[MortenCopenhagen]

Thanks for explaining the process, @JeroenM .

I have just never seen the Service Area Businesses come up as a suggestion to what I should review. But I have compiled a private list of them. All on the list show very problematic behavior in terms of stuffing keywords in their names. Adding location info in names. And have quite a few fake addresses just to boost their presence in search results.

Sorry, I’m not going to write a post on address-less businesses for #LGCTM. But I hope someone will.

Cheers.

[LuaPL]

In Spanish

Tema amplio @JeroenM . Formas de limpiar.

A menudo que circulo por mi cuidad, apago una red móvil, para no dejar rastros y evitar preguntas sobre lugares que he pasado, pero no los visite y los enciendo en los lugares que sí yo visito. Esto es porque al regresar a casa, tengo preguntas que no puedo contestar por falta de información. y tener que borrarlos de mi lista de contribuciones. Eso implica que mis rutas estén incompletas. Y tener que borrar sugerencias de lugares por los que pasado y no he entrado, es algo común y necesario, sobre todo cuando pasaste por ellos hace semanas o meses. No se debe dar información de tanto tiempo atrás hasta un año, las cosas cambian y mi información no sería confiable.Pero enciendo la opción de comprobar los datos, hay mucho que hacer allí por un punto creo, pero así es maps y no se trata sólo de fotografías. En comprobar datos, hace pocos días atrás, me apareció la pregunta si ese lugar era visible ( no recuerdo estas palabras exactas) o si era un lugar privado.Sería la forma de preguntar si era un SAB o una pagina web?

[LuaPL]

In Spanish

@JeroenM el tema de las notificaciones en nuestras contribuciones es asombroso. Aquí presento capturas de pantalla de dos sitios web que yo no los visite fisicamente. Aquí dice en español “nos llamo”, sí es cierto, yo los llamé por telefono y se supone que por llamarlos por teléfono debo calificarlos y hacer comentarios, eso me sugiere Maps, eso no lo puedo hacer, ni siquiera se si tienen un lugar físico y si sus datos son correctos, yo recibí la mercadería en mi domicilio.

screenshot of contributions on maps where it says:call us a week ago.

[JacquelineB]

Thank you, @JeroenM for this post!

Thanks for the clarification.

My comments on Facebook were also a question, that you answered here and now very helpful!

Greetings, Jacky

[JeroenM]

Dear @JacquelineB

The emphasis in this article is not purely on the fact that website visits are now listed as a reason to review a business. We discussed this on FB and I personally don’t find it a very smart idea from Google. It will be the cause of so many more undesirable contributions. People will get confused by the pushy contribute suggestions.

I don’t understand why Google is so greedy when it comes to soliciting our ratings and reviews. It makes no sense.