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Can Local Search Replace Directories?
By Julie | April 1, 2007
Understand: I think most major directories, at this point, suck.
Consider:
- DMOZ: Mostly broken, and they’ve reached the volunteer organizational size where bizarrities and politics get in the way of either people who want to volunteer, or any of the volunteers being effective.
- Yahoo!: Listings are by those who are paying for it. Editorial review is mostly ‘is this site really in this category?’ and ‘is this really a site?’
- Business.com: Finicky that you not only be a business, but that you offer B2B services.
- Everyone else: either still for-pay, or so minor as to be useless anyway.
These days, people paying to be in are doing it because they know it’s got SEO value, or they’re hoping it does. I’m suspicious of traffic stats to anyone but Yahoo!, given the semi-integration to Yahoo! Search that remains (although less as of late).
Local Search placement seems to be a place where there’s some gooshy Web 2.0 flavor that can be added that can do what directories used to claim to do, but even then didn’t necessarily. Ease of adding a business, even one that doesn’t do Yellow Pages, is easy. Editorial review, to date, is fairly limited.
For a lot of verticals, this could be something major. And the way real estate allocates, it could bump some of the dreadful AdSense farms found for some searches, way down.
My only concern is that should this evolution take place, monetization will go the way of Yahoo! Directory submission, and again pound the little providers.
Topics: SEO, advertising, directories, lead generation, link building, local search, nostalgia, rant, search results |
