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-   -   Will Yellow Page websites increase my PageRank or SEO? (https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/web-design/3342-yellow-page-websites.html)

naimeiiz 08-03-2011 04:51 AM

Will Yellow Page websites increase my PageRank or SEO?
 
If I got my website listed in a yellow page directory like yahoo's yellow pages, would that help increase my pagerank? The pagerank information in the yahoo directory says "no page rank information available."

kpmedia 08-04-2011 04:25 PM

PageRank is a statistical popularity-based ranking system that uses a voting structure. But instead of comparing it to the one-person/one-vote system found in many modern democracies, jump back in time a century or two, when only wealthy white men had one vote, and everybody else had a portion (3/5ths, for example) or nothing. Partial power or no power. In a PR based system, the more popular (and/or authoritative) you are, the more powerful your voting power. You could have a 1/10th vote, or no vote at all! So considering all of that...

When a site has no PR or PR 0, it has nothing to pass. The site is considered (for lack of a better adjective) worthless. Sites that it links to don't really gain anything in terms of PR. Just remember that PR is separate from SERPs (search engine results pages, and where you site may fall in those 10-item pages).

Search engines like Bing don't use PR, either. PageRank = Google. Yahoo currently uses Bing.

Yellow pages are very 1970, 1980, even 1990 or 2000. It's a way to list out phone numbers for available businesses in a certain area. Yellow pages generally reflect the business name, address and phone number of a business with a physical storefront presence. A place that you can call to make an appointment, or simply walk in as a customer. In an age where so many businesses are run by freelancers or small organizations that have no physical walk-in store, and are targeting online audiences, yellow pages have little to no value.

A good website, with good SEO, will be listed at the top of a search engine when you type in its name. With really good rank, it will come up for terms related to your business.

Yellow page sites have little to no rank of their own, are probably considered "paid links" by search engines (meaning total or near-total devaluation of the site's authority), and generally don't get a lot of organic traffic. The only time I even see yellow pages on results is when the company has no site, or their site is terrible. Will having them link to you possibly increase your SERPs? Sure, maybe, why not. If you have tons of money to piss away, time to spend submitting information, time spent correcting it, then maybe you'll get an itty-bitty little bump (+1 PR at best, cumulative from all yellow page sites combined). Will it be by any extreme amount? No, highly unlikely.

I know a few businesses in the local area that pay stupid sums of money each year to be listed in printed and online phone books. In all honesty, they're now little more than scams. Dozens and dozens of scams come calling every year, wanting what really just extortion money. I did work for a place a few years ago, and the phone book pitches were always very shady, and came from slimy phones salesmen and poorly-written pitch letters. They used bogeyman tactics about how nobody would find us -- even though it was a local monopoly on one of the largest streets in town!

For example, consider a college named "Northern Artists University", the only college within 25 miles, more than 50 years old, and well-known to probably everybody within a 200-mile radius. One of the scammy yellow page companies would send you a letter, made out to "North Artists College", with the wrong phone number listed. In order to "update" this information, it was only $499 per year. The letter continued with scare tactics how nobody would find you, and it was urgent to return the letter, confirming information, or paying to "update" it. I doubt anybody had correct information. It was bogus crap, in desperate need of being "filed" in a shredder.

Yellow pages just aggravate me. Where I live now, we get anywhere from 3 to 6 different books each year. Most of them contain wrong numbers, bad information, list companies that went out of business last year, etc. Unless the electricity is out, I'll pick up an iPad to find a phone number, and 99% of the time I'm visiting the official site of that business. Yes, this means no site = no business. Sometimes I'll use Google Maps, which gives full information on the business.

I'm of the opinion that many of the yellow pages sites online are just scrapers, which grabbed data from the online edition of print yellow pages, which was acquired by means of the scams mentioned above.

Most online yellow pages lack website URLs. When present, the URLs are internalized redirects that don't pass rank, are unlinked, or have anchor text comprised of "click here". There's basically zero SEO value to be had here.


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