Google Maps Hurting Webmasters

With the latest Google update many will really start to question Google's promise to "do no evil", it's been increasingly one of the most asked questions at seminars, forums and cafes alike! Is there some evil creeping into Google? Or is this just lawful market domination?

Never the less, in the latest Google update we see something REALLY stick out, and that's the huge jump in Google Maps advertising & positioning. This is something that has webmasters and SEO experts asking for Google blood.

Lets take a really good example a good friend thrust upon me.
If you search for "Terrigal Accommodation" in Google, you'll get a result like the screen shot below & you'll notice how prominent the Google Maps positioning is:

So if your're not advertising with Google, chances are your clickthrus will suffer because you've just had the "oh so pretty" Google Maps sponsors thrust upon you! Users will more than likely be drawn to the nice Google Maps image and small sponsored listings.

Now what you probably don't know, is that Google gets it's local business listings through a partnership with TrueLocal.com.au. So if you have not paid for a listing on their website, you have much more work ahead of you to come up under the Google Maps listing here. Shouldn't everyone get the chance to optimise their site and come up under local business listings on an even playing field? Seems Google thinks not.

Sure, you can goto their Local Business Center, insert all your details, locations and even store photos, but you won't be magically featured in the Google Maps inserts at the top of Google search results, sure, you're store locations page probably gets crawled and ends up in Google Maps, but at what point does your business get promoted to the search results map, and how do they rank the importance of your location to feature on the results map?

Must you have paid for a listing on TrueLocal? I'm not sure.
So is this fair? What happened to the left hand side is for natural ranked pages only? Now i'm a pro-google kinda guy, but this really gets to me. It's guaranteed to reduce traffic to natural ranked sites who will now site below the huge Google Maps promotion. Would love your comments!

Oh, and I'm sure that Stayz.com owners - Fairfax Digital - wouldn't be happy at all. They would be experiencing a huge reduction in traffic to their previously number 1 ranked search term "Terrigal Accommodation".