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Generic firms pretending to be local

Grumpy Old Lemons Like You
Clitheroekid
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Generic firms pretending to be local

#159241

Postby Clitheroekid » August 13th, 2018, 2:39 pm

One thing that drives me barmy is Googling for a local service and being faced with pages of adverts for firms that pretend to be local but aren't. All they've done is buy up local domain names so they can pretend to be based in the area.

The latest example of this is that I wanted a private detective in Windermere. It's important in this particular case that they are familiar with the local area.

So I Googled `private detective windermere' and was presented with pages of firms of detectives whose names give the impression they're based there.

For example, the one at the top of the list is the Windermere Private Detective Agency, and the bit of text on the Google page includes the words "and to business and corporate clients in and around the Windermere Area."

Excellent, I thought, but when I went to the website I read "We are a UK based agency of private investigators, based near Central London".

So that was a wasste of time.

Next on the list is "Private Investigator Bowness-on-Windermere". Even better - Bowness is ideal.

A quick visit to their website provides further reassurance (although the English is a bit dodgy) - `Our male and female private detectives in Bowness-on-Windermere will pay great efforts and apply all their professional skills to solve your problem soonest.' And `If you ever have any of need in services of a private detective in Bowness-on-Windermere, feel free to contact us and find reliability, confidentiality and effectiveness.'

Sounds just the ticket. But when I look for contact information the address is 80-83 Long Lane, London. Hardly handy for Bowness.

And so it went on. Although the websites all purport to be local not one of them actually is.

It's really annoying. I want the job done urgently, and it includes serving legal documents on someone, but with all the firms I contacted it was necessary to send the documents to somewhere else - Essex, for example - and they would then presumably deliver them onwards to a local agent, which is a massive waste of time. Needless to say, they wouldn't tell me the details of the local agent to enable me to send the documents directly.

Incidentally, in my searches I came across some odd firms, including one called UK Honey Trap - http://ukhoneytrap.co.uk/index.php. I was particularly intrigued to note that `Because of our coverage we can also offer an emergency honeytrap service where we are able to act at very short notice be it day or night.' The mind boggles! ;)

Slarti
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Re: Generic firms pretending to be local

#159291

Postby Slarti » August 13th, 2018, 4:22 pm

Try opening Google maps and right click on Bowness to get the What's Nearby and enter Private Detective in there. Or Investigations.

Also, try a different query engine like DuckDuckGo as a lot of businesses pay to be at the top of Google searches.


Slarti

UncleEbenezer
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Re: Generic firms pretending to be local

#159394

Postby UncleEbenezer » August 13th, 2018, 11:24 pm

Some of this nonsense is down to the spammers who have weaponised regulators to attack google. Basically if google supplies the results you want, it's officially abusing its monopoly to cut out all these sites that'll come up for {your-keyword}-{any-location}. So it has to give you a bunch of useless generic sites and make you jump through hoops to get anything useful.

Slarti's suggestion to use maps with your keyword to search locally is probably your best solution.


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