For the past year the Town of Sechelt has been carelessly “misplaced” by Google. Considering how often we turn to Big Brother for information this was a pretty serious issue, especially for all those small businesses who rely upon search engines like Google to help customers locate them. Unfortunately, Google didn’t seem to care about the accuracy of its information.
Here’s a screen shot taken just a few days ago. The black arrow shows the correct location, while the upper red arrow shows where Google had misplaced Sechelt. If you look a little closer, you’ll see that this misplaced location is actually a lot closer to Whistler than Sechelt, and that’s why this is such a big problem. If you’re a business owner in Sechelt, Google searches for ”any business, Sechelt” are directed to those businesses in Whistler, and that’s no good for “any business” in Sechelt.
Now back to Google’s reaction when this was pointed out to them…zzzz…. repeatedly, over the past year…………..zzzzzzz… even the Mayor of Sechelt wrote a letter…zzzzzz…. on official letterhead…..zzzzz. How do you spell frustrating – with a capital G, followed by all their other cute little letters.
Until, like an epic battle between David and Goliath, a couple of bloggers Miss 604, and Robert Dall intervened, to take on big brother, urging a calvary of tweeters into action with a rallying call “tweet @GoogleMaps with the tag #PutSecheltOnTheMap”
Holy viral Batman, we’ve got ourselves a new map!!
Thank you Miss 604, Robert Dall, and all of the others who shamed Google into finding our lost little community. Now if we could just get Google to actually label Sechelt on their map… maybe we still need to keep Tweeting.
www.coraclecove.com – a small business in Sechelt
Thanks for all your help and with geting our town back where we belongs…
Thank you Robert – you were one of the first to get involved and it looks like we’ve finally got it done.