Came across this article on another blog of a flower business in denver (DenverFlowers.com) that almost went bankrupt because of google.com mapping glitches.  This should serve as a lesson for all domainers not to put all your eggs in one basket.  Diversify the methods your geo domain receives traffic, as well as your investments. An educational read, but feel sorry for the DenverFlowers.com owners.

“We own Denver Flowers, Inc. in Denver, Colorado. We have 2 retail locations in Denver, Colorado. Our url is www.denverflowers.com. We have been listed on Google for approx. 3 years. We have the #1 natural position in Denver Flowers. We have the #2 natural position in Denver Florist. We have spent $118,000 in adwords advertising for
the past 3 years.

When performing a natural search for Denver Flowers you solely get a local map for Lehrer’s Flowers: Denver, not Denver Flowers. When searching for Denver Flowers Denver, you get a map of one of our locations. When you search Lehrer’s Flowers, you get no map at all.

When searching any metropolitan area in the US, this type of mapping result NEVER occurs outside of Seattle, Washington. When performing the natural search for Seattle Flowers, the search result is a map for Seattle Flowers in Seattle. Every other metropolitan area returns multiple results for “flowers in xxxxx city”.

Lehrer’s is our largest competitor in Denver and this has basically shutdown our business overnight. This update was done to the maps 36 hours ago and there was an immediate, massive reduction in our volume. Approx. 95% of our business is internet based volume. ”

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