Having correct and consistent online business listings and gaining positive reviews in those listing venues are an absolute must for obtaining higher rankings in the search engines these days, especially for companies who provide ‘local’ services such as practitioners, contractors, attorneys, repair companies, etc, or who sell products locally, for example restaurants, auto dealers, etc. Continue reading
When is a Duplicate IYP Listing Not a Duplicate?
In the world of online business listings there exists different definitions of what is a ‘duplicate listing’. Internet marketing professionals may view listings in a different light than an internet yellow pages (IYP) venue or a data aggregator might. That is understandable, since we each have different reasons for working with the data contained in said listings.
Some people understand the importance of not having incorrect/duplicate business listings in existence, however it appears that some venues or business owners seem to think it is OK for a business to be listed more than once in a particular business directory. Continue reading
How Can Online Business Listings Help My Website Rankings (vs Backlinks)
The interesting thing about citations in general is that they can help raise the trust of a company in the search engines, even without a link pointing to your website. Google sees mentions (aka ‘citations’) of your business name, address, and/or phone number (NAP) online as reinforcing the existence of the business. The web pages containing these mentions help to expand search engines’ knowledge of your business; thus adding trust.
Search engines can more confidently gather and interpret information about your business when there are more listings in existence that contain data about the business, and these listings contain proper data. For example IYP listings may contain your business’ hours of operation, description, category keywords, etc. Continue reading
Which IYP Listings are Most Important for my Business?
In the online business listing industry there is no exact standard for determining which internet yellow page (IYP) directories are the most important for citation building purposes. I’ve seen many ‘top 100’ IYP venue lists and even a ‘top 1000’ list out there somewhere. So how can we know where we should list a business online? Continue reading
Fixing Business Listing Errors in Local SEO on Angie’s List Can Be Confusing
Dealing with local SEO issues like yellow pages tech support can be frustrating at times. That is a good reason to leave it up to the business listing correction experts, like us. It gets even more complicated when support staff are feeding their clients misinformation.
I believe that the tech support department of Angie’s List may be confusing their search engine terminology. I wrote Angie’s List to have them update the phone number in a listing for one of my clients recently. I followed up a few weeks later since I did not see the live listing data updated yet.
They replied saying that the listing had been updated. They also said that if you are not signed in to the website (as a member) and you are seeing outdated info (which they may have updated already), AND you found the page via a Google search, then it is a Google cached page that you are seeing. Huh!?! Continue reading
Best Practices for IYP Venues to Deal with Duplicate Listing URLs
In a white paper published by Yext called ‘The Definitive Guide to Duplicate Listings‘, Andrew Shotland suggests 3 ways that IYP websites can handle duplicate listing URLs. In the section called ‘Best SEO Practices for Publishers Dealing With Duplicates’ he recommends that publishers:
1. 301 Redirect Dupes To The Canonical Listing
2. Or Use Canonical Tags
3. Or 404 Them Continue reading
What Yext Does NOT Do For Your Online Business Listings
The YEXT Service
Is Yext, alone, enough to fix your online business listings once and for all? Using Yext to correct your company’s name/address/phone (NAP) discrepancies on internet yellow page type websites has many advantages. In a matter of hours your proper business info can be synced on at least 40-50 venues with another 10-15 venues corrected within a few days or a week thereafter. However, there are a few reasons why you should trust your business listing submission, correction and optimization work to professionals instead of taking a DIY approach and using Yext alone. Continue reading
Removing Spam Google+ Local Listings & Fixing Hijacked GMM POIs
When you type in a search for a local service or product in Google, you would expect to see a list of various providers in the area returned in the search results. Sometimes, however, these results are hijacked or tainted by spammy looking local listings, which can cause issues for the other, legitimate, local businesses.
Some spam listings not only dilute the search results, but can also completely change the type of results that Google displays. If Google feels a particular search is a ‘branded’ term, such as a company’s name, it will return results focused more towards that particular company, such as it’s website with the corresponding G+ Local listing information attached to it and other relevant pages about that company below it (such as its LinkedIn or Facebook page or YellowPages or BBB listing.) Continue reading
Using Google’s URL Removal Tool to Get Outdated Business Listings Unindexed
How can you get outdated internet business listing URLs removed from Google’s search engine results when the actual listing is already updated with new information?
Google suggests using the following methods to remove/block a page from their search engine results pages (SERPS):
- robots.txt
- meta “noindex”
- 404 page
But what happens when you don’t control the website or internet yellow page (IYP) venue in question does not use the above suggested methods? Continue reading
UBL.org Review & Case Study – On Correcting (or Adding) Business Info Online
Having an incorrect business address, phone number, or name appear online can be a frustrating situation for small business owners! Who has the time to go manually claim and update the plethora of business directory listings online when erroneous data is found? Continue reading