[donmcronald]

It's so common you have to assume Google is happy with the way it works. Flowers, locksmiths, tow trucks, etc. all have parasites like that in their industry. Basically anything where you don't need to be there physically is going to have someone trying to game the system to act as a middle man that does nothing.

My mother got scammed by the flowers version by clicking on a Google Ad and not realizing she was dealing with a middleman that was doing nothing more than adding $50 to local prices and calling in orders. And when people that don't realize what's going on feel like they got ripped off, the real business seems to be the one that gets the bad review.

The easiest thing to do is to assume Google is nothing but spam and scams. I'm convinced there's a market opportunity for local web indexes similar to what Yahoo used to be because there's nothing to use for discovery that isn't trying to scam you.