Spam and Advertisements Infiltrating Google Maps

I use Google Maps a lot and for the most part it is pretty good, but one issue I have with it lately is the amount of spam that is popping up on the maps. Often when you zoom in you will see what looks like the name of a business but if you look closer you will notice it is placed on a residential house. Dig into the details more and you will often find that the business is not actually located there and may not even have a location at all.

It seems many people are just using Google Maps as a free way to advertise their business. They will put a link to their website in some random place hoping to get more traffic and attention for their business. This is a problem because these links are cluttering the maps with useless information. Businesses that have no physical store location should not be posting on Google Maps. It is not a free advertising service.

You can report these posts but in my experience reporting them does not do much and I still see the same listings on the maps long after they have been reported. Google really needs to do something about this issue.

It seems anyone with a Google account and put whatever they want on the map. Google needs to start verifying this stuff better before publishing it to the world. They need to find a way to distinguish businesses from houses and areas on the map where nothing even exists.

I know some people may have a home based business and for those, I might give an exception if they use their home address as their business address. For the other cases where people are just posting links to their business in places that have nothing to do with their business it is not ok and these listings should be removed.

People at Google, please look into this before Google Maps becomes just a mess of random spam and advertisements.