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 (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:category=Southwest Furniture vs. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:shop=furniture)
• Lazy errors (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity=place_of_worship for a fish restaurant)

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