Do Local Search Spam Penalties Exist?

[jlara]

If a large network of sites has been banned by Google can they still rank in Local Search Results / Map Results / One box results?

I just found a huge network of form / domain content spam sites. They look like they have been penalized for natural search, but they all do fairly well in the local search results.

That led me to thinking about the difference in the type of data and how spam penalties could be applied to local? We know many sources are used to pull this data and it is possible to backdoor in many different ways.

So if the site data is there, is it being purged of known spam sites before making it the one box or map results?

[Receptional Andy]

I don't think (most?) web search penalties apply to Google local search, which IMO is still far from ready for prime time.

More recently, Google have removed some of the gaping holes for spam from the local results, but I still find their inclusion in high-profile Google SERPs surprising. It's possible to have a single domain fill the entirety of the "one box" for even highly competitive searches - and not uncommon to see multiple entries.

[fishfinger]

Agreed - the worst offenders I've seen in the UK are in 'tradesman city', and in some instances they're managing to tie up 8 of the top 10 using the same telephone number! We're talking 'tradesman capital city' in one instance, been that way for months.