Local Search the fun continues with local.com
Probably the most popular post on this blog to date is the one where I likened CitySearch to the mafia.
Local.com, though, has risen to levels of extortion. In comparison, CitySearch is just a school bully extorting lunch money. Here’s the story:
One of my clients on a fairly regular basis receives some really really poor local reviews. I mean they start with, “DON’T HIRE … ” For the most part, these reviews are unjust in that the nature of my client’s business is they deal with some fundamentally unhappy people. We also receive really poor reviews from people who are obviously competitors. It is just the way things are in this industry.
As an online marketer I endeavor to get poor reviews removed. I have had some fair amount of success because most of these reviews are so over-the-top they clearly violate posting policies of Yelp, Yahoo Local, and other local search sites.
However, the bigger problem is with the review feeds. Yelp in particular has setup a bunch of partnerships that allow their reviews to appear on other websites. One of these is local.com. Now when I go look at my client’s profile page’s at local.com, I see reviews attributed to Yelp that were removed 3,4, or even more 6 months ago.
When I contacted local.com, I was first told that they have no control over the Yelp reviews appearing on their website. Wow! local.com is a publicly traded company, and they do not control their own website. Seems a bit on the crazy side to me. I push a little more and find out that if I only upgrade my listings for many thousands of dollars a year, my client’s listing pages will be regenerated without the old Yelp reviews. Ah, the sweet sweet sounds of extortion.
Clearly, I am not going to contribute to the welfare of such an unethical company (ok, I might if I thought there was some positive ROI to be had), so I push a little further. I am now told that I can request my listings to be deleted entirely. Sounds like a good plan - I encourage everyone to do the same.
BTW, I also left a review of local.com on local.com at http://www.local.com/details/908909/irvine-ca/blocalcomb-corporation.aspx. It will be interesting to see which gets removed first.
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