Some business directories and data aggregators contain huge percentages of bad listings including gone-out-of-business companies and duplicated listings. Pankaj Mathur of InfoUSA recently estimated that some sources such as Dunn & Bradstreet, Acxiom, Localeze and Google Maps might contain 17-to-18-million records, or up to 4 million more records than actual, live businesses! That’s as much as a 28.6% error rate!

I know from experience that some percentage of a business directory’s bloat can be caused by inability to figure out if a business has closed up for good or not (most data sources are not set up to verify each individual business, although InfoUSA remains an example of the gold standard, relying on a practice of phoning each and every business to verify it’s viability at least once per year, and also using a number of other signals of possible closure). These old, dead business listings clog up a great many online directories and can result in poor usability when consumers attempt to drive to their doorsteps for products or services.

However, another source of bloat is in the form of duplicate listings, and as a search engine marketer, it’s these duplicate listings that my clients sometimes have which concern me highly. Just as with duplicate webpages in regular SEO, duplicate listings in business directories and within Google Maps can potentially dilute down a company’s possible ranking score, resulting in lower overall rankings and poorer online performance.

Back in February, Google and other search engines jointly announced support of a canonical tag for webpages, enabling webmasters to specify which page URL should be treated as the main/authoritative one for search engine indexing in cases where multiple URL variations could occur.

If such a protocol makes sense for the general web search engines, why not a protocol to assist in reducing dupes in local search, too?

Google Maps help suggests that users can help them identify cases of duplicate listings, but the problem is that dupes may be constantly coming in through all of Google’s various data partners.

At the recent Kelsey Conference, local directory industry experts predict that Cost-Per-Call is increasingly going to become a dominant pricing model and this will mainly happen through individual directories displaying different tracking phone numbers for the same businesses – and all these different channels with separate phones feed into Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Bing Maps, and other local search engines. So, potential issues from many various phone numbers could be increasing.

Tracking phone numbers are not the only potential problem – sometimes a company’s alternate phone numbers and fax numbers will get parsed off into separate business listings, causing further instances of duplication.

So, how could this “Canonical Phone Tag” effectively be accomplished? hCard Microformat already provides a framework for doing something like this. A canonical phone tag could be formed like this:

<abbr class=”tel” title=”000.867.5309″>000.123.4567</abbr>

In this example, webpage users could see the “000.123.4567″ tracking phone number when they view the webpage, and the machines could instead glean the authoritative, canonical phone number for the business, “000.867.5309″, and ignore the tracking number.

So, is this a solution in search of a problem?

How many of you have encountered instances where a tracking phone number has gotten indexed in a separate listing alongside a business’s primary phone number/listing? If so, this solution may be worthwhile to consider in keeping all of a business’s ranking weight combined in one listing as opposed to distributed across many.

Natural Search Performance of Top Yellow Pages Sites in Google
(Click to enlarge)

One specific recommendation I make in the “Brave New World For Yellow Pages” article at Search Engine Land is to perhaps partner with sites which could expand information on many business listings. The three sites I mentioned, ShopLocal, NearByNow or Where2GetIt, all have some rich data which could easily be leveraged by a major IYP site into many, many more search engine referrals. Companies such as these could provide specific product inventory info for many local stores, along with comparison tools allowing price-conscious consumers to zero in on cheapest local providers.

Doesn’t it seem strange that an online yellow pages site hasn’t already provided product inventory information for shops?!? Well, they have, or at least some of us did in the past, perhaps before the concept’s time had truly arrived. At Superpages.com and BigYellow.com, we partnered very early on with a company which did this, called StoreRunner — a company which subsequently died during the infamous dot-bombs. We also partnered with some others, including MySimon, which is still around.

Superpages has an even newer incarnation of similar stuff in their current online shopping section which combines display of products from spidered online sites with similar products from eBay and product reviews from elsewhere. (Though the section is pushed down some in prominence on the site, and is perhaps not as well-supported as other sections.)

Yet, the local shopping app-killer needed by online yellow pages remains elusive. I don’t think any of them really connect the dots in a major way between more comprehensive product/services information about businesses with the business listings.

As a consumer, if you could use a yellow pages to search for actual products, model names and comparative prices in the stores in your local area, wouldn’t that be a step up from merely finding addresses and phone numbers? Wouldn’t it be great if you could consistently peruse menus from local restaurants while deciding which one you’re going to for dinner? (Amazon.com once experimented with scanning in menus from restaurants around a major city!) Yet, the costs and time in connecting this information to many businesses’ listings and business profiles has made most yellow pages companies avoid truly stretching to meet the challenge.

But, it’s not impossible. ShopLocal, NearbyNow, and Where2GetIt have all done this in one form or another.

The company which achieves a mixture of: robust business directory, combined with social media & reviews, combined with increasingly extensive product/service info about businesses — that’s the company which could win big in the local search arms race.

I describe in the article how Verizon spun off Idearc Media (division which publishes print phone books and operates Superpages.com among other online yellow pages), and set that company up to pay back some billions of dollars for its worth. Verizon then turned around and resold those debt instruments to other companies, fully divesting itself of ownership in the new, standalone company.

This sequence in of itself isn’t remarkable – it’s the normal process a company might go through when spinning-off part of itself to form a new company.

But, my contention is that it was done so in a highly irresponsible manner. Verizon had to know beforehand that print directory business was going into shrinkage mode, and that the debt repayment structure would simply be too much for the new company to be reasonably expected to be able to handle. If so, then this could be expected to be a form of fraudulent conveyance, and Verizon could be culpable.

Is my contention outrageous?

Well, even Idearc’s Chief Executive, Scott Klein, has been paraphrased by the Wall Street Journal as saying “Everyone was aware that ‘$9 billion was really more debt than this business could bear’”. So, Idearc was spun off with a majority of this debt from Verizon from the start – clearly set up to fail.

So far, I’ve seen maybe three different law firms filing class-action lawsuits against Idearc and its executives, based on the premise that the stock tanked due to them secretly changing policies, resulting in inflated-looking sales on the books for businesses with higher likelihoods of not paying for contracted advertising. But, I think the real culprit in all this is likely Verizon – they pushed off a part of the company with an untenable debt load, in large part to pay off debts incurred by Verizon FiOS (Verizon’s fiber optic network) expansion.

Back in 2004, I laughed and laughed and laughed, and I told coworkers that it was a huge waste of money, because, I said, “they won’t be able to buy themselves into the top position for searches for ‘Yellow Pages’”. SuperPages.com long held that distinction under my SEO direction, and I knew that purchasing the term in a domain name alone would not depose all the work we’d done to rank tops for it. As time passed, however, yellowpages.com has indeed deposed the Superpages forerunner.

Still, the domain name didn’t accomplish this alone. There were a mixture of factors involved. AT&T used a considerable war chest of new capital to gain marketshare in the YP space. I believe they likely undercut other players and made major traffic deals with partners in order to gain greater traffic — so, some of their position was purchased. Also, the AT&T company has much greater prestige and far more customers than the previous owners of the “yellowpages.com” domain name, and they could leverage their print phone book covers to further promote the URL. This meant that far more people were inclined to link to them, and the domain name itself, embedded in all those inlinks, gave AT&T a defacto advantage in the PageRank game.

Further, Google itself shifted ranking factors slightly between now and 2004, placing a bit greater weight upon keyword terms within domain names.

And, after I left the Superpages, a number of my recommendations for ongoing SEO were neglected to some degree by the people overseeing such work. This resulted in Superpages getting deposed from its longtime slot as first position for “yellow pages”, and Yellowpages.com has been occupying that position for a while since.

Just for the sake of egos and prestige value, it might appear on the surface that AT&T’s investment in the yellowpages.com domain name was justified in order for them to achieve top ranking. But, this is the world of business, and considering the direction in which society and commerce has been shifting, their purchase of that old domain name and the more recent purchase of YP.com appear to be at a hyper-inflated cost that is way out of whack with any good business rationale.

First, I know for a fact that they never have gotten sufficient value from that original $100 million dollar domain name. Knowing exactly how much traffic goes to the top position for “yellow pages”, I know that it’s never paid for itself, and it’s unlikely to do so. (Okay, so I know that they also got a number of other business assets along with the domain in that original $100 mill price-tag, but even considering that, this domain was a very bad buy.)

I’ve written previously about the decline in user searches for “yellow pages”, and that decline is continuing:

(Google Trends graph shows ongoing erosion of user searches for “yellow pages”)

Fewer and fewer users are typing “yellow pages” into Google, as this graph demonstrates. It would’ve taken “yellowpages.com” a good many years to repay for itself even when the traffic for “yellow pages” keyword searches was good, but with this declining trend in those searches very apparent, this is no longer a realistic longterm investment, and it will turn more rapidly into a major capital loss.

Considering this ongoing, downward trend, the monetary worth and traffic-bearing value of both “yellowpages.com” and “yp.com” are declining. Many feel that the overall concept of “yellow pages” could be fast disappearing as well, and that will leave these as very dated-feeling trademarks only a short ways down the road. I’d say there are a very good number of young consumers today who don’t even know what “yellow pages” is! So, even the brand name value of these appears very short-lived.

I’m doubting that even the short term, ostensible existing traffic of YP.com is worth this $3.85 million price tag.

If I were an AT&T stockholder, I think I’d be mad enough about this to demand an accounting. With a number of major yellow pages companies experiencing significant business problems currently, this purchase is just incomprehensible. But, since AT&T’s yellow pages business unit is still attached to their telephone company, perhaps they have the luxury of wasteful spending on this piece.

Decider brings local business listings for bars, restaurants, music venues, events, and reviews. It appears to be targeted to the college-to-early-thirties demographic, and sports advertisements on the pages.

When I heard about Decider, I immediately though, “oh, yet another business directory site among the many others,” — a thought apparently shared to some degree by Andrew Shotland.

Yet, I don’t think local search has hit a point of “critical mass” like the largest point of expansion just before an industry’s bubble is about to burst. While I do believe that there is likely to be some collapsing of the businesses at the top of the local directory food chain like major yellow pages, the cheapness of launching local businesses at the bottom of the equation virtually guarantees that there will continue to be many more contenders continuing to enter with their own takes on the local search experience. The barriers to entry for launching a local directory are quite low, and various related local info APIs cause the barrier to reduce even more.

Greg Sterling points out that The Onion’s intro into local directory space isn’t all that surprising, since they are a type of newspaper — though, newspapers have also been struggling to get up to competitive speed in the internet age.

Oh, and I should also take a moment to point out that Decider has been fairly savvy in trying to construct a site that is very search-engine friendly. Their developers have obviously worked to incorporate SEO elements into the construction. Page titles are pretty well-formed, along with Meta tags and H1s. Page URLs are very spider-friendly and include keywords.

They even get a special place in my heart for incorporating hCard microformatting elements, although I’m not convinced that their microformat code is valid — the hCard stuff isn’t recognized by my Operator toolbar in FireFox, so I think they may’ve set the hCard up in an invalid manner, perhaps.

Australian Yellow Pages in Google results (click to enlarge)

Amusingly, Lifehacker mentions, “The fact that it was ever blocked is frankly one of the weirdest Internet strategies imaginable, but that’s another story.”

I can well remember back when Superpages allowed me to optimize the yellow pages content — it’s so gratifying to see the dramatic traffic increase that occurs when a site that has blocked content is suddenly opened up for spidering and indexing. Sensis will undoubtedly enjoy a similar punch up in traffic now, and their clients will benefit from the added visibility, too.

Why did they block Google for so long? Could be simple ignorance, or it could have been the continued use of a Business 1.0 strategy. For one thing, internet yellow pages sites are huge targets for dataminers who harvest listing information for re-use in many ways, including spamming of email addresses, composing telemarketing phone number lists, as well as building competing directory information sites.

Google could have been blocked automatically as a seeming dataminer. Heck, they ARE dataminers of a sort, but most of us in the search marketing profession have taken to viewing them as benign/beneficial dataminers. It’s the difference between parasites and symbiotic organisms.

Lifehacker goes on to say that they’re skeptical about Sensis’ claims that businesses businesses listed in their yellow pages will get more visibility in Google SERPs. Actually, this is true, if Sensis does all their search engine optimization (“SEO”) correctly. To take it to the next level, Sensis will have to not just open up to the bots but also perform additional Local SEO.

(Coincidentally,  and even more amusingly, Sensis’ General Manager of Online Search and Directories is also named “Chris Smith”. Yes, I grudgingly admit it — my cloning project has been humming along, and I now have successfully accomplished being in more than one place at a time so that I can do SEO for multiple companies simultaneously.)

I’ve seen other, equally-large booths for online yellow pages companies, but this one seemed particularly attention-getting and inviting. The glowing yellow desk and the simple design made the thing very friendly-looking, and the geek in me was drawn to the near-real-time search volume graph they had playing up on one screen.

YellowPages.ca appears to continue to be functioning successfully, although it’s also likely getting impacted by the IYP industry rumblings and fears. The Yellow Pages Group parent company has apparently started launching aggressive ad campaigns to promote the use of their legacy printed yellow pages books as well as the YellowPages.ca online directory and their mobile search services. (ad campaign press release)

The ad campaign is using large yellow darts to beat the message in that consumers will be able to find exactly what they’re seeking through using the yellow pages — perhaps as a subtle dig at Google, since Google Maps searches may also include broader keyword-match results that might be unrelated to a user who is strictly seeking business listings.

The Torontoist reports on a part of the yellow dart campaign that is using some cute guerilla marketing tactics — check out the photo of a plumber’s van pierced by a giant dart, parked on a street in Toronto. The YellowPages.ca logo is prominent on the side of the dart, and the dart’s fins read “plumber found”.

I also noticed this interesting YellowPages.ca landscaping ad on an embankment alongside some commuter train tracks in Toronto. These landscaping ads strictly sported company logos as far as I could see and were apparently targeting the eyes of passengers as they passed along in the trains.

(click to enlarge)

The question remains, however – will massive ad campaigns and clever promotions be sufficient to bolster online yellow pages usage during a time when users appear to perhaps be migrating to the major search engines for business searches?

As he mentioned, I’d previously listed this idea in my somewhat tongue-in-cheek post on “Extreme Local Search Optimization Tactics” some time back.

While my Tactics were intended to be a bit over-the-top, the tactic is indeed likely to work to varying degrees in different search engines and internet yellow pages directories, as Mike outlines. I should note that I only endorse the engineering of business names for purposes of branding and for purposes of targeting business-category/product/service terms for which the company involved is actually providing.

I’m not big on throwing away a brandname completely, even if it contains no good keywords — I’m more in favor of adding keywords to the existing business name in a meaningful way. For example, a business named “Xymax Corp” might rename themselves to include their product name: “Xymax Corp Rubber Seals”. This would be good for the business, good for the consumer, and therefor good for the search engine, too.

As Mike aptly outlines, there are a number of other considerations beyond just optimizing for search, such as creating a beneficial image to the company, and building towards longterm customer retention. If you used too fly-by-night a sounding business name, you could expect fewer clickthroughs per search rates than if you used more conservative, reassuring names. So, it would be easy to damage your performance to some degree by mucking this up — you could increase the amount of times your business listing comes up in searches, but simultaneously decrease your click-through-rates.

Mike further states that one should approach business renaming with great care, and I wholeheartedly agree. If you’re not a professional in local search optimization, you might just shoot yourself in the foot. But, with thoughtful deliberation on the multiple factors involved, doing a rename to add in some valuable keyword(s) could improve your referral rates from search engines.

Under the new functionality, businesses may type in custom business categories, and the interface also provides helpful potential term using the Google Suggestion Tool:

(click to enlarge)

Free-form categories is a slightly unique way to address the need of businesses. Yellow pages companies have traditionally offered businesses the option of categorization under many thousands of unique categories — on the order of twelve thousand to fifteen thousand categories in some cases. However, YP companies have also carefully considered and turned down requests for additions of completely new categories in some cases, mainly due to how yellow pages are constructed — if there are too few businesses in a category it won’t make monetary sense to add it into a directory. And, if the category name is too esoteric, consumers won’t search for it anyway.

With Google’s local search operating more closely as a straight keyword search tool, businesses could associate categories with themselves that are as specific as they desire without affecting usability or cost.

In other, related news, Google has announced that YouTube videos are now integrated with Google Maps, allowing businesses to add video info to their listings.

I’m seeing more and more articles on the subject — this article indicates that as consumers perceive that there’s low usage and little need for print yellow pages books, they’re also coming to believe that the books sent to them are an inconvenience and an unacceptable environmental waste. (I’ve also mentioned before how I find the print directories less worthwhile, even though I used to work for a major yellow pages company.)

Apparently the Cambridge city council and other cities are actually considering going so far as to enact laws requiring that residents must opt-in for receiving the books, or they might ban mass distribution entirely…

The Boston article does reiterate some fallacies, though, when they state:

“In the age of the Internet, it simply makes no sense for residents to get fresh stacks of phone books when they use paperless web browsing to find local businesses anyway. The shift does not cost phone book companies in the long run because they offer the same advertisements on their websites without spending extra on costly printing. Yet the companies still deliver millions of new books each year without asking residents.”

No, this is not so, and it indicates that the reporter didn’t attempt to objectivity by getting commentary from major phone book companies. First of all, not all yellow pages companies give parallel advertising to their print advertisers — often, internet ads and print ads are sold as two separate products. So, they don’t “offer the same advertisements on their websites.”

Second, it may cost the companies more, because print directories have long been one of the most profitable areas of advertising, and these companies’ internet directories do not always equal the profits they’ve been getting in print — after all, there appears to be considerably more competition in the online space where there is a much lower barrier to entry than in the legacy print directories.

The article further misses that it would increase the administrative costs for yellow pages companies if they have to maintain some sort of opt-in records for book distribution. Currently, many YP publishers contract out book distribution to low-cost contractors who are directed to deliver books to businesses, hospitals, hotels, homes and apartment buildings. The low-skilled labor only has to drop books off — no time-consuming record keeping involved.

It is an editorial piece, but I think it would be stronger if they’d at least acknowledged some of the points from the side of the YP industry while giving the opinion that print book distribution should be sharply reduced.

This article, and the phenomenon it’s demonstrating, are intellectually fascinating, though! Print yellow pages companies have a vested interest in continuing distribution of the books as long as possible since it helps to rationalize the continued advertising costs they charge from businesses. But, if there’s any truth to the assertion found in this article — that a substantial number of residents never use the books — then continued distribution of them is a bit like the Emperor’s New Clothes — it’s just giving advertisers the illusion that there’s greater usage of the books and associated worth of the ads in them.

It’s sort of generally expected that as advertisers perceive that the value of the print ads is decreasing, they’ll slowly pare back their print ad budgets, and yellow pages books may die off by a sort of attrition over the coming years. However, this article and other similar ones I’ve seen would indicate that there could be a really ironic alternate fate for print — that consumers themselves in cities and states might force them to halt their traditional mass distribution rather than mere advertiser attrition. If this happens, it could radically speed up the death of print.

I’ve mentioned before along with other analysts about how there are indications that usage of traditional yellow pages is dropping off, though there’s a lot of disagreement as to how much longer the print products can survive. The decrease of the print YP book industry alongside simultaneous evolution of internet business directories is going to continue to define the characteristics of accelerated business evolution in the modern age.

(See also Greg Sterling’s post about print potentially becoming opt-in.)