Fake Local CBD Stores: How SEO Spam Hurts Local Businesses
Manufacturing relevance and misleading consumers by exploiting search rankings.
If you've tried Googling local CBD stores, you've probably noticed a few shoddy websites with no evidence of a real local presence, along with about a million listings for closed stores in old internet directories like Yelp and Leafly.
Everyone wants to shop with small, local businesses, so why are they so hard to find on Google and other search engines? That would be because of one of the most annoying scams small business owners face today: the Location-Listing Spam Scam.
National online retailers use mass-produced location pages to appear in searches for communities they have no connection to. Despite Google's explicit policies against this kind of search-engine manipulation, these websites continue appearing prominently in local search results, often displacing real local businesses.
It's absurd. It's infuriating. And it's crushing local businesses in your community.
Google's SEO Spam Problem
Google's content policies explicitly prohibit these practices under what it calls doorway abuse and scaled content abuse. Both practices are addressed in Google's Search Spam Policies.
Doorway abuse includes creating substantially similar pages targeting different cities or regions to funnel visitors toward the same commercial destination. Scaled content abuse involves producing large quantities of unoriginal content primarily to manipulate search rankings rather than provide useful information.
Google says it wants useful, original content created for people rather than search engines. Yet its ranking systems continue to index and reward websites employing precisely the practices its published policies condemn.
Consider Pure Craft CBD.
Pure Craft CBD: 25,000 Ways to Say Nothing
In advance of the upcoming Federal Hemp regulations changes Pure Craft has rebuilt their website around compliant products, pivoting from cheap intoxicants to "wellness." But at the time of writing there are no Independent Lab Test results available on their website despite prominently advertising their products are independently tested.
What they do have is an extraordinary collection of geographically targeted articles. Its Local CBD Blog contains approximately 25,000 articles, targeting communities across the United States.
The pages are largely identical, switching out the names of cities Mad Libs-style. Compare its pages for Ames, IA and Meridian, ID. You'll find much of the same content presented as though it were relevant to two different local markets.
The purpose is apparent: capture local searches for CBD in as many geographic locations as possible and direct those customers toward the same online storefront. This is precisely the kind of mass-produced geographic content Google's policies are intended to address.
Yet these pages have appeared prominently in search results for years, sometimes outranking businesses that actually operate in the communities being targeted. In addition to harming businesses in your community, these slop farms harm consumers, too.
The Consumer Protection Problem
Where is the business actually located? Where do its products come from? Who is responsible when something goes wrong? Does the retailer understand local laws?
Companies know these are questions that are important to consumers. That is why they use marketing strategies like doorway abuse to fake local relevance. Retailers that use these strategies often take steps to obscure information about product origins, ownership, and fulfillment to maintain the appearance of a local business wherever they're advertising.
Pure Craft is one of the largest slop farms we've encountered in the CBD industry, but it isn't alone.
Re-Lax CBD maintains an extensive collection of geographically targeted pages, including pages for Boise, Meridian, Pocatello, and dozens of other Idaho communities. Meanwhile, the company's published contact information identifies its operations in Florida.
EarthE CBD employs a similar strategy, publishing geographically targeted pages for Idaho communities despite operating out of North Carolina.
All three companies advertise products that are illegal in Idaho.
During independent reviews of companies like these, I often have difficulty finding the physical location of their offices, verifying ownership information, or finding contact information for someone that actually works at the company.
Sometimes the only way to determine where their products come from and who actually manufactures them is to place an order and trace the shipping and return addresses. Other times, I've had to request laboratory reports, which are sometimes redacted to obscure company information, and contact the testing laboratories directly to identify the businesses behind the products.
The business model behind these operations can be remarkably thin. Manufacturing, fulfillment, customer service, and even marketing and web development can all be outsourced, leaving the brand primarily responsible for little more than a reputation laundering service, giving mass produced products the appearance of a local artisan retailer.
But when a company's principal skill is faking relevance in thousands of communities it has no meaningful connection to, at the expense of real local businesses, what exactly is it offering consumers?
How SEO Spam Hurts Local Businesses?
Nowadays, local businesses face a fundamentally different competitive environment. Small businesses aren't just competing with their neighbors, they're competing with national corporations and all their marketing resources, too.
The businesses with the strongest connection to a community aren't necessarily the businesses that appear when people search for that community.
When mass-produced geographic pages successfully attract search traffic, they create a financial incentive for more companies to do the same. The result is a race to the bottom where businesses, large and small, produce more slop, target more locations, and invest more money in manipulating search visibility.
Consumers get increasingly irrelevant search results as more spam suppresses relevant local businesses. Local businesses face more competition for their own geographic searches. And the companies manufacturing slop gain access to customers they would otherwise struggle to reach.
And Google plays a plausibly deniable role in hollowing out our economy by creating another challenge for small businesses to overcome.
What Can Consumers Do?
This is not a problem that can reasonably be solved at the individual level. Slop content now multiplies faster than ever before due to the integration of AI into web marketing. The only scalable solution is for Google to decide it wants to serve real people real content again before bots and faceless middlemen overrun the internet entirely.
But in the meantime there are a few steps you can take to protect yourself from this scam.
Before purchasing from a business appearing in a local search, investigate the company rather than relying on its search ranking.
Find out where it actually operates, who manufactures its products, whether its laboratory testing is credible, and whether its products meet applicable local requirements. And if you want to support a local business, verify that the business actually has a presence in your community.
At Herbal Edge, we've spent years working in Idaho's CBD market. We know the manufacturers, the retailers, and the challenges Idaho consumers face. We're not opposed to national online retail. In fact, we ship products nationwide ourselves.
We're opposed to the flagrant disregard for Google's own content policies that degrades the online experience for consumers and disadvantages small businesses across the country.
And we believe Google should enforce the standards it claims to uphold.
