Imagine going to the Post Office to check your post office box to discover that all of your mail and receipts for the past few weeks had been forwarded to an unknown party.

The Post Office informed you that there was no chance of getting your receipts back and if you wanted to start receiving your mail at your PO Box once again, you needed to go over to their new business center and fill out some forms to claim your box.

Just notifying the Post Office that it was your box was not enough to protect it in the future. Due to normal delays in processing it would be 2 weeks before you started receiving your mail and money again.

If you’re a small business with a local listing in one of the major search engines, you need to beware: the same scenario described above could happen to your local search result info if you’re not careful.

The apparent hijacking of a large number of independent florists in Google Maps several weeks back is just such a story. Google, in the role of Post Office, allowed someone to hijack listings in the Florist industry using the community edit feature.

For those of you unfamiliar with the incident here is a brief recap. The technique, apparently in widespread use in the locksmith, pay day loan and other industries, exploited weaknesses in Google’s Community Edit capability.

In this newly reported case in the floral industry, affiliate mapspamers targeted high ranking florists in major markets that had not claimed their business listings in the Local Business Center so as to be able to benefit from an existing business ranking and reviews.

The spammers, using the community edit tools, would change the phone number to another local number, change the location of the business slightly and then proceed to add a category, a new URL and ultimately the change name of the business.

Apparently the small move in location convinced Google’s system that all subsequent changes were legitimate. The listing would retain the ranking and reviews of the original business but redirect to a Canadian florist fulfillment house via the affiliate’s website. The listings displayed prominently in the Local 10 Pack on searches for florist in major markets across the U.S.

Clearly every small business needs to claim their 'FREE' listing in Google’s Local Business Center to be sure that the information that is presented to the public is accurate. But as we have seen, not every small business is aware that they need to GET IT DONE NOW!

Within 2 hours of me adding my business, a search for: "tooling suppliers in Derby" put my business in top slot of the google golden triangle!