If you own a small business with a local listing in one of the major search engines, you need to beware of apparent hijacking. Google allowed someone to hijack listings in the Florist industry using the community edit feature. In newly reported case in the floral industry, affiliate map spamers targeted high ranking florists in major markets that had not claimed their business listings in the Google’s Local Business Center so as to be able to benefit from an existing business ranking and reviews. The spammers, using these 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.

Source:→ SEL