Background

There exists at least one company out there that sells a service of boosting client company’s ranking in Google search results. One of the tactics they employ to accomplish this is putting the company name and website in as many places as they can. One of those places is a node on OpenStreetMap. It should be pointed out that there is nothing inherently wrong about adding this information to OSM. In fact, it is encouraged. However, the methods by which this particular company accomplishes this go against many of the best practices and guidelines that the community has set forth. This has caused much frustration in the community having to chase down their edits and correct them. Many attempts have been made to contact this company to work with them to correct their behavior, but they have all fallen on deaf ears.

Bad Behavior

Some of the actions the SEO has engaged in include the following:

• Creating throw-away OSM accounts for every single edit they make
• Registering accounts with email addresses that are ignored
• Using email addresses that purposefully hide the organization that created the accounts
• Spoofing or masking their IP addresses

These are all tactics they are using to avoid user and IP level blocks so that they can continue to pump bad data into OSM without being blocked.

Bad Data

A sampling of their additions shows the following type of problems:

• Street addresses that are abbreviated (Rd vs. Road, St vs. Street)
• Unit/Suite information improperly added to addr:street
• Freeform text in the opening_hours tag
• Upper case characters in key names (Telephone vs. phone)
• Made up tags instead of proper feature tags (category=Southwest Furniture vs. shop=furniture)
• Lazy errors (amenity=place_of_worship for a fish restaurant)

While it might be easy to suggest that we should just fix these up for them, I would say that is something I and others are happy to do for new mappers that need a hand, but for a company that “contributes” and has done thousands of additions, it is something they should learn and do correctly from the start.

Communication Failures

The list of attempts at correcting these behaviors is long.

1. Changeset comments
2. Tweets to the company CEO
3. Phone calls to the sales team
4. Escalations through the sales team to upper management
5. Messaging through LinkedIn to engineering contacts

These have all resulted in stonewalling or radio silence.

Remedies

For the time being, the next step (with blessing from the DWG) is to revert these additions manually. I have some software that looks through changes for some obvious patterns of abuse and marks these nodes for deletion. The goal is to get the SEO to come to the table and start a discussion.

FAQ

Q: Are you saying that SEOs should be banned from contributing to OSM?
A: Absolutely not. There is no reason that SEOs that are well behaved should not be able to contribute to OSM. In fact, I think they should be encouraged. They have the potential of being an asset and valued contributors.

Q: Why don’t you just leave their additions alone and correct the data?
A: There is no excuse for experienced mappers making simple errors time and time again. There is no reason that they can’t be taught and follow the easiest of guidelines. For them to dump bad data on the map and expect others to clean it up for them is inexcusable.

Q: You deleted XYZ, Inc. Was that a false positive?
A: I believe that I’ve only made a single false positive out of the first ~150 deletions, and that was only because I fat fingered a command. If something looks mostly correct, or even 100% correct, it might be because everything about the node addition leads me to believe it is by the SEO and the purpose of deleting it is to get the attention of the SEO so that we can finally discuss the issues.

Q: Can I add the business you deleted back to the map? I’m not an SEO.
A: Certainly. (Assuming you are trying to follow best practices, your re-addition of the business with correct information and format and style would be appreciated.)

Q: What makes you think a particular addition is from the SEO?
A: At this point in time, I’m keeping the detection methodology secret to prevent them from further gaming the system without addressing the root problems.

Q: Are you going to delete all objects that have simple misspellings or abbreviations?
A: Of course not. New users don’t know all of the intricacies and even seasoned users will sometimes make errors or typos. The difference here is that the latter will be responsive to changeset discussions and are generally happy to learn, while the former purposefully ignores comments and refuses to engage or change their behavior.

Q: Are you going this across the entire globe?
A: No, just the United States. I’m not sure yet if this SEO company makes edits beyond the U.S., but I’m only concentrating on U.S. based changes.

Q: Will you expand this eventually to the entire globe?
A: No. If someone else wants to do something similar for their region, I’d be happy to share more about what I’ve learned, but I have no desire to do the work myself.