Are Yellow Pages links good for SEO
-
I have a client that has 2500 yellowpages.com links like this one http://m.yellowpages.com/hillside-nj/guardianship-services Are these SEO relevant? Can they hurt SEO efforts. Is this something should push for clients? Can Yellow pages be a good link building strategy? What say you?
-
These links are coming from when a business advertises with Yellowpages.com. I have seen evidence that they are destroying one of my clients NAP's because each link is coming from a different city that the local business doesn't belong to them. Have your client Stop advertising with them immediately and disavow all links just to be safe.
-
Without having the client's site to be able to check, I'd guess that the reason you're not seeing these links popping up within Open Site Explorer is due to the size of Yellow Pages' site in conjunction with the way that we compile our index.
When we crawl through a site during the indexing process, we limit the number of pages that we'll crawl on a single domain in order to help us sample a broader and more diverse link landscape (or Mozscape, if you will ). There are a few million pages on Yellow Pages' domain, and since we elect to cap out indexing a single domain around ~50,000 pages (I'm uncertain of the exact value), only a relative handful of the most prominent pages on the domain would be included to avoid index saturation. I hope this helps to explain what you're seeing there!
-
Hi Miriam,
What a great question. Yellowpages.com has linked to individual blog posts on my clients site from each town listing in New Jersey. I have like 70 posts on the site and there are like 550 twps. in New Jersey so there you go.
They don't show up in my Moz Analytics or open site explorer. I see these links in google search console. I imagine that these are no follow?
Thanks
-
Hey Donald,
YP can be a good citation for a local business but I am puzzled by the sheer number of links you've found - 2500? Most businesses would not have 2500 listings (unless they are McDonald's or something like that). What is the origin of this many links from a single entity?
-
Hi Donald,
I normally stay away from yellowpages as google can see this as spam and even more so when you have 2500 coming from one site. I normally disavow them altogether. If they acted like a other local listing sites and didn't give so many links it's fine but yellowpages is known to do this for sure.
Local Citations can be a great part of your link building but you need to be careful and insure its done right. Here is a page Moz has put together https://mza.seotoolninja.com/learn/local/listings about local listing/citations and why you should do them and how to get started.
Hope this helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What are the best link strategies to increase rankings in Local Pack / GMB and where to find them?
As someone who manages GMB for 50 plus local US clients, I absolutely loved this article https://mza.seotoolninja.com/local-search-ranking-factors#local-pack-finder-ranking-factors and found it somewhat useful. Most of the gurus are saying link building is the key, but I wish at least one of them would mention where do we find these links. Is there a reliable source for this ( based on personal experience only please ) ? A one stop shop for any local business to do quality links ? I feel like to be truly useful to a local business this piece of the puzzle is missing and I would truly appreciate anyone's help.
Local Listings | | OlegLevitas2 -
GMB best practice for chiropractic office (individual vs. business pages)
For a chiropractic or other doctor's office with multiple doctors, should each have their own personal Google My Business page page AND a business page for the practice? If they just have a business page now, is it worth creating a page for each of the individual doctors? And what if some of them have different focuses (like a acupuncturist and chiropractor), does that mean you should make individual doctor pages when you otherwise wouldn't bother? And IF we should create pages for the individual doctors, should they all have the same address and website since they work in the same practice. Curious if there is a best practice for this... has anyone seen positive or negative results with or without the individual doctor pages? Thanks!
Local Listings | | Mike-i0 -
Local SEO Strategy after Pigeon update.
We are a local web design agency and well ranked with several local city level keywords. Now we want to spread out our services to near by cities. What's the best way to do that? Example: We've already ranked for "web design new york". Now how can we rank our site with "web design in Washington" and "web design in California"? Note: We've good DA and PA (above 60) along with higher Trust Rank. But don't have those new keywords on our content.
Local Listings | | Jubaer960 -
Location pages for Two location business
Hi friends, I have a website with two brick and mortar locations. Right now I have both NAP's listed on every page on the sidebar and footer. I don't have either in schema format yet, as I don't know if I can have two schema's on the same page. 1. In the near future, I will be publishing pages for each individual location, but I want to keep the NAP of the other location on that page also, in case the visitor would prefer that location (they are only a few towns away from each other) Is that going to cause issues? Should I only have the NAP of that location? Which should I have schema data for? 2. Also, I have location pages for the surrounding cities, which we have added a Google Map with directions to the closest location, written directions, a few local reviews, and a paragraph about services. I want to publish these asap to rank in those ~10 other nearby locations. What NAP should I have on those pages? The closest location, or both? 3. Linking in the Google Local/My Business. I have verified both locations Google Local's, and I want to link them into the respective Two locations once published, but I want to do it properly. I read on one location seo article that I should change the website listed on the Google Local profile to the new url of that location, and link to the Google Local on that page. Is this correct? Which Google profile do I link to in the other location pages? or both?
Local Listings | | JustinMurray0 -
Placement of products in URL-structure for best category page rankings
Hi! I have some questions regarding the optimal URL-hierarchy placement of products in a marketplace setting where the end goal is to attract traffic to category pages. Let me start off with some background, thanks in advance for the help. TLDR Goal: Increase category page rankings. Alternative 1 - Products and category pages separated, flat product structure. Category page: oursite.com/category/subcategory Product / listing page: oursite.com/listing-1 Alternative 2 - Products and category pages separated, hierarchal product structure. Category page: oursite.com/category/subcategory Product / listing page: oursite.com/product/category/subcat/listing Alternative 3 - Products placed directly under category page. Category page: oursite.com/category/subcategory Product / listing page: oursite.com/category/subcategory/listing I run a commercial real estate marketplace, which means that our potential search traffic is _extremely _geographic. For example, some common searches are (not originally in english): Office space for lease {City X} Office space for lease {Neighborhood Y} Retail space {Neighborhood Z} And so on... These terms are already quite competitive, where the top results are our competitors geographic and type category pages. For example: _competitor.com/type/city/neighborhood , _is a top result, where the user reaches a landing page that shows all the {type} spaces for lease in {neighborhood}. These users are out to find which spaces are available for lease in these geographical areas, and not individual spaces. I.e. users do not search in the same extent for an individual product, in this case a specific empty space. Our approach has been to place an extreme bias towards a heavy geographical hierarchy. This means that basically any search, resulting in a category page, on our site results in a well structured URL like the following: _oursite.com/type/state/city/district/street, _since we are using Google Maps API's, this is easy and relevant for the user. Our geographical categorization beats our competitors both on extensiveness and usability, especially in long-tail search phrases where our competitors don't care to categorize where we are seeing real search volumes. The hierarchy only extends as far down as the user has searched, for example a lot of our searched just end up being _oursite.com/type/state/city/district. _ Now we are wondering how we should place our products, the empty spaces, in this URL structure. Our original hypothesis was that we should include the products in the original hierarchy, resulting in: oursite.com/category/subcategory/product. Our thinking was that we would both be serving the user with an understandable and relevant URL, and also provide search bots with a logical structure for our site and most importantly content for our category pages. Our landing pages are very dynamic, providing information by relaying graphical information on a map instead of in an SEO-friendly manner. I would however go as far as to say that these dynamic pages provide a ton of value for the user, much more so than our competitors, by describing relevant information about the neighborhood kind of like Trulia, just not in a bot-readable manner. This results in trying to rank them on their own merits being a challenge, whereas we were hoping we could create relevancy by placing products / listings and maybe even blog posts on the topic within the same URL-hierarchy. As of right now our current structure is oursite.com/products/category/subcategory/product. In other words, they are categorized in the same geographical fashion but under a separate URL-path. Our results so far is that we basically only rank for the product pages, and rank extremely poorly for our category pages, which is our ultimate goal to enhance. This is why we developed the above hypothesis. However, what we learned when we did some initial research is that very few e-commerce stores place their products directly below their categories. Most of the major websites we studied, and we looked at quite a few, just go for **alternative 1 **from above. The crux is that most of them choose alternative 1 but simultaneously implement bread crumbs that emulate alternative 3, just without the actual URL's. So, what I'm asking is, what are the actual benefits or downsides of the three alternatives? I feel as if I have a pretty firm grasp on how this could be done, I just need to better understand why most seem to choose to flatline their products or listings in the alternative 1 fashion. Thanks, Viktor
Local Listings | | Viktorsodd0 -
SEO issues with Physician and Practice not ranking for their own names
I've inherited an SEO client who's got all kinds of ranking problems. Currently his name Dr. Laddis shows up for his old practice, Saratoga Cardiology Associates (http://saratogacardiology.com/) instead of his current one Cardiology Specialty Services (http://cardiologyspecialtyservices.org/ ) He's also showing up with a G+ for the old practice that's listed as closed. The 2nd listing is for his bio on the hospital page.(<cite class="_Rm">https://saratogahospital.org/doctor/theodoros-laddis-md-facc/ )</cite> Then come the usual Dr directories. His YouTube channel shows up. But his actual website isn't until the middle of the 2nd page. I'm also having similar issues getting the practice to show up in search (http://cardiologyspecialtyservices.org/ ). As I was coming on board, they also had a name change from Saratoga Cardiology Specialty Services to Cardiology Specialty Services. Their G+ local business page has the custom URL for Saratoga Cardiology Specialty Services but the name on the page is Cardiology Specialty Services. Their website is actually part of the hospital multisite with a URL redirect. While the site shows up for "cardiologist Saratoga" their G+ page doesn't show up.(https://plus.google.com/+Saratogacardiologyspecialtyservices/about ). I've also done on-page SEO and am still in the process of submitting to directories. Any thoughts on what the hangup is or what I can do to clear up this mess would be appreciated.
Local Listings | | IT-dmd0 -
Best practice for local SEO when two offices handle different services?
Our agency has three main services - SEO, PPC and web design. We're in the process of setting up a new office in a different city where our PPC team will be based, while SEO and web will stay in the original office. How do we handle local SEO/Google My Business listings in this situation? Geo-targeted service pages and two separate GMB listings?
Local Listings | | CustardOnlineMarketing0 -
NAPtastic: Google updated G+ page to "correct" street spelling, but not Maps
A client's G+ page updated from "Jimmy" to "Jimmie" Rd. The change is technically correct according to the legal county road name, though the Places, G+, and indeed even the printed inscription on the Google map itself all say "Jimmy." So, too, does virtually all of the NAP instances around the web. Question - should we update Business Registration Managers with the updated address info and assume the Google change will also eventually filter to other Google assets, or make no changes? Weird, right? Here's the Place: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Georgia+Square+Collision/@33.9357517,-83.4885575,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0x57927ad08d139333 Thanks!
Local Listings | | PerfectPitchConcepts0