Argh! My client, who just happens to be my husband, has had his Google maps listing hijacked. And this time it’s not a case of him not registering his maps listing in the local business center and it being unverified. It’s really hijacked!

We created the listing a few weeks ago for his newly launched website, CodeSense, and added all the details together. His listing was doing pretty well for web development Sydney, when this morning I discovered overnight he’d transformed into an Indian software company called Nestsoft. Interestingly my husband is a director of a company called Netsoft, however they are not in India and whilst their website is not pretty, it’s certainly not as tragic as Nestsoft.

See in the listing – it’s the second one down – it’s got a phone number that’s switched off (we’re presuming fake), but it’s still got our original CodeSense description. The title is different too. It’s on the first page page if you search within Google maps

And when you click into it, it’s just mighty confusing…

See the CodeSense description and email address are still there, along with Nestsoft and their crappy logo.

We’ve checked out the local business center to see if it had been hacked and no, it looks normal – no sign of Nestsoft at all. So at this stage we’ve lodged an enquiry to Google and will wait to see the response.

Has anyone else seen this happen before?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 12:42 am and is filed under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.