Have you heard the news?
Duck Duck Google is a new game being played that could impact millions of business owners and online marketers around the world. The game is a great enhancement to Google Maps and looks like fun for consumers searching for information about specific geographies. It also looks like fun for local small business owners hoping to get found by these consumers.
Here’s how it works. People searching Google are given a map with a set of results. The results are push pins on a map. The push pins are correlated to a set of local business listings. Nowadays, each local business has a full page associated with it’s listing. When claimed this page is capable of hosting rich and detailed information about that business. These pages will also “suck in” relevant business information, such as reviews, from different places all over the web.
It’s cool. But here’s the problem — despite public promises from Google that it would not index these pages — it seems the game is rigged as it relates to natural search results. In other words, these maps pages — which are controlled by Google — are indeed getting indexed and are surfacing on page one of Google’s natural results.
NOTE: Danny Sullivan thinks this might be a simple mistake caused by Google product managers not understanding the difference between between a robots.txt block and a meta robots block.
Let’s hope he’s right. If he’s not — online marketers everywhere will be forced to play a game that’s not quite fair.
