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Actually, I since discovered that “SuperDex” is the trademarked name of a chromatography product, so that potential brand name is in-use and not available!

Perhaps some other brand name could result from the theoretic union of yellow pages companies, like “SuperKnows” or “DexMedia”. Maybe even “DexPages” or “SuperOne”!

It would probably be ultimately least expensive to keep one dominant brand name — I think Superpages has more brand equity overall, so that’s what I would vote towards.

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.

Berman states that while the market in 2006 may’ve allowed Verizon to take billions in the deal divesting itself of its directories corporation, Idearc, he further states:

“It took too much.”

Will there be any consequences for Verizon’s throwing off these companies with unserviceably high debt loads? Burman reports:

“These things matter greatly to how state and federal regulators perceive the company. Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Hawaii each are in an uproar over the FairPoint divestiture, with much of the ire directed at Verizon.”

In a brief video piece, David Berman debates the issue with Evan Newmark, who takes the opposite viewpoint that Verizon should not be held responsible for the performance of its divested companies.

I find part of Newmark’s argument in the vid segment to be facile. He initially argues that Verizon’s CEO, Ivan Seidenberg, did a clever/good thing because “…he unloaded these companies before they could go under within Verizon!” This is just plain dumb, because they wouldn’t have failed within Verizon. In the case of Idearc, the business unit was too small to cause the great corporate mother ship to founder, and it’s the Verizon spin-off debt load it was saddled with that caused it to be unable to function in the first place. He misses the point that Verizon took too much money out of the spinoff deals. Those weren’t existing debts associated with those business units prior to their divestment.

These companies wouldn’t have “gone under” within Verizon. It’s possible that if a business unit starts to lose money for a quarter or two, the board would naturally require it to correct itself in some way. But, arguably these companies experienced a much higher degree of financial problems due to the extremely high debt they were required to service subsequent to spinoff. These spinoffs funded Verizon’s FiOS expansion — a gigantic project that was paid for by Verizon offloading the investment costs to the companies it spunoff.

So, this was not at all a normal case of companies failing to survive in the competitive marketplace: they were sandbagged at the outset.

In the video, Berman cogently states that “…it raises the question of what responsibility does a seller have to the health of a buyer’s target afterwards…”.

To this, Newmark responds, “Caveat emptor” (well-known Latin phrase meaning “Let the buyer beware.”). One wonders if Mr. Newmark would be quite so glib if he were on the receiving end of a lemon the next time he purchases an automobile. I think not. This is essentially what I’m stating has happened to stockholders of these Verizon spinoff companies.

Newmark finally, grudgingly, states that because it’s a heavily-regulated company, “…Verizon cannot be doing deals which appear to rip people off…”.

I’d go a bit further and say that if it looks like a rat and smells like a rat, it’s a rat.

It will be interesting to see if the Securities and Exchange Commission gives Verizon a pass on their spinoffs of bankrupt companies as Newmark seems to think reasonable, or if they don’t respond in some way to consumer and state government complaints.

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.

• Following online local searches, consumers most often contact a business over the telephone (39%), visit the business in-person (32%) or contact the business online (12%).
• 1 out of 5 local business searchers with an Internet-accessible cell phone have conducted a local search via the mobile Web.
• Those that own wifi devices (such as the iPhone) are the most likely to conduct local business search via the mobile Web, with more than half of these respondents reporting mobile local business searching.
• 30 percent of respondents still rely on directories as their primary local business research source, despite a 3 percent decline from 2007 to 2008.
• Traditional IYP sites such as Superpages.com, YELLOWPAGES.COM, Yahoo! Yellowpages.com, etc. account for 60 percent of local IYP business searches.
• Local Search sites such as Google Maps, MapQuest, Yahoo! Local, etc. account for 40 percent of local IYP business searches.

Now for the inevitable questions from me: how representative are these findings for overall consumers in the U.S.? As you recall, I recently questioned the accuracy of yellow pages usage statistics from a Yellow Pages Association (YPA) -sponsored study because it failed to include a major, growing demographic: cell phone users who have no landline phones at their residences.

First, this new TMP Directional Marketing & comScore study are possibly not any more representative of overall population than the YPA study, because it was only based upon an “…online survey of 3,000 respondents…” — so, it missed inclusion of stats involving people who do not have internet access — and, that’s likely still a significant percentage, I’d assume.

However, this new study is more believable to me than the earlier YPA study, because the findings fall more in line with what we might reasonably expect. The TMP-comScore study indicates that 30% of respondents rely on print YP for their local biz research sources (compare with the YPA study which states that 87% of the U.S. population used print YP last year). This doesn’t compare apples with apples, I know, but the figures are measuring somewhat similar things, and the TMP/comScore study also indicates that there was a 3% decline from 2007 to 2008, while the YPA study showed no major decline at all — something that seemed odd to me, considering the 7.6% downward slide the year previous.

While conventional wisdom holds that print YP can expect some percentage of usage decline with internet and mobile local search usage increasing, one cannot always trust conventional wisdom — one needs to check assumptions with actual research. In this case, though, the YPA study left out cellphone-only households which could reasonably be expected to use print YP less, and that might explain why that study showed no decrease in overall print YP usage from the year previous. In comparison, the TMP/comScore report likely does include both landlined and cell-only household respondents, and it shows a continued slide in print YP usage.

Do not get me wrong — I believe based on a wide comparison of statistics that print yellow pages remains a very important part of the local search marketing mix, and usage of yellow page directory phonebooks is statistically significant. I’ve mainly been questioning some industry statistics regarding how much overall usage of print YP there is, and it appears questionable when those stats don’t show some ongoing erosion of print usage.

Greg Sterling notes that print usage is going to vary by regional area and by business category:

In terms of the outlook for print usage, it’s going to be market by market and category by category. It will be very strong in some markets and categories and quite weak in others. Mobile’s impact is a bit of a wild card at this point: does it cannibalize print, Internet or is it largely “additive” to either or both.

I’d agree with that completely. Some business categories have seen a much more sudden shift from print to internet search as a referral source for their customer base. Variation by market is interesting to consider — I can see that there’s likely a more rapid shift in larger population areas than in small towns — small towns having far fewer businesses to select from and thus consumers there not needing greater research capabilities. There’s also likely difference by regional demographics as well, since more affluent markets might see greater shifts from print to home computers and mobile. Perhaps there’s also some side effect involving communities which are more internet-savvy as well.

As you may know, Pay-Per-Post involves paying bloggers to write articles endorsing products, services or companies, and in this flavor it also involves using those posts to link back to the company’s site in order to help build PageRank.

The blog post is very thinly disguised payola – as Kohler points out, the blog is purportedly belonging to someone in Arkansas, while this post appears to be all oriented around providing keyworded links involving Pizza in Minneapolis through DexKnows. The blog has a large “payperpost” ad badge on it, too, and if you read through the articles, every single one seems to be engineered to sound like someone writing about random daily life incidents, but always with a couple of injected keyword links.

In context, it’s glaringly obvious that the blog is a paid posting. Kohler posts a comment below it, asking if it’s a paid post for Dex, and the author replies that she doesn’t “know who’s Dex”.

Kohler further pokes fun at Ken Clark, a yellow pages industry advocate, for also linking to that blog post and citing it as a golden example of how valuable the general public finds print yellow pages. Again, Kohler posts a comment below Clark’s blog post, challenging him for linking to it while while calling it an example of a consumer’s “actual experience”.

Clark responds back defensively, saying that there’s no reason to think it’s a pay-per-post piece!

While trying to insist that the original post isn’t payola is pretty laughable, it seems obvious that Clark was just innocently duped by the faux blog. The YP industry has been in a very defensive mode lately due to bad press about print YP viability versus online ad competition, and it’s unfortunate when the legacy industry advocates display this sort of naïveté with new media — it really tends to undermine their case to some degree when they demonstrate a lack of savviness in the new marketplace.

Here are some of the other pages I found linking to DexKnows which also appear dubious:

www.livelaughblogg.com/2008/08/find-dentist-in-minneapolis.html

www.productivus.com/blog/2008/07/phone-directory/

www.joy32-joy.com/2008/08/dexknows-las-vegas.html

www.obstaclesandglories.com/2008/08/dexknows-flagstaff.html

www.langging.com/2008/08/minneapolis-directory.html

Once you visit a few of these, the types of blogs they are posted upon all begin to seem to be faux, and the posts themselves begin to all appear fraudulent.

This whole interchange illustrates what sort of problems there are with pay-for-post done badly, and DexKnows is likely now to reap some considerable Google penalty for getting involved in this sort of thing.

There’s not necessarily anything wrong with pay-per-post, so long as it’s clearly labeled as a paid sponsorship message of some sort. When it’s not clearly labeled, it fools people into thinking it’s an objective endorsement.

Google and the other search engines take a dim view of paid links which seek to manipulate natural search rankings. Google penalizes pay-per-post blogs when they detect them for this reason.

In fact, I heard Matt Cutts state at SMX Advanced a few months ago that Google is likely to devalue links obtained through any duplicitous means, including viral link bait (such as shocking ficticious stories engineered for the purpose of rapidly building up PageRank).

Link-building is one common component of search engine optimization, so it’s not all that surprising that R.H. Donnelley would be doing it in some fashion for their DexKnows.com site. However, link-building is also an extremely sensitive area where the search engines are concerned, and using really aggressive tactics like this are very dangerous. Here in this case, some amount of money has been expended to obtain paid blog postings, but now it’s likely that all that money has been wasted as these sites will undoubtedly get any PR yanked, if they had any to begin with.

It’s quite possible that DexKnows.com didn’t know that this sort of thing was being done. They may have provided some link-building budget to an agency or external contractor, and they may not’ve been aware of what was being done in their name. If this is the case, it would likely be worthwhile for them to clean up what was done, discontinue contract with that agency, and send Google an apology note.

There are plenty of ways of doing link development that do not run against the search engines’ guidelines.

I employed a number of best-practice style link-building strategies when I worked at Superpages.com. One of the most basic strategies is to build valuable, useful content which people will want to link to. For instance, links from .EDU sites are some of the most valuable in terms of ranking power, but very hard to achieve since universities and schools are generally not open to being paid to link to commercial interests. So, we built campus yellow pages for hundreds of universities and colleges across the U.S., and this resulted in many of those schools linking back to Superpages.com.

For the same amount of resource time and expense, you can build something that’s bona fide as opposed to something intended to fool the search engines.

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.

As I point out, those statistics were all based on telephone polling, and those polls missed having representative samples of cell phone only households, according to their published methodology. Various research groups and government agencies have been saying that this is a significant chunk of the population — anywhere from 13.6%, growing to as much as 25% by the end of this year.

When you further realize that this segment is younger, and likely earlier adopters of technology, you can see that there might be a strong reason to believe that their usage profiles probably differ significantly from the land-lined population — they’re probably using print YP less than those who were polled.

This chain of reasoning is an assumption — there’s no absolute evidence to support it. But, the lack of representative sampling in the original polling data leaves us with no alternative but to try to put the findings up against logical reasoning.

It’s hard to monitor and assess usage of offline media, so print yellow pages are not the only ones that struggle sometimes to show value proposition. Print newspapers, magazines, billboards, and others also have similar difficulties in showing how many consumers see them.

Of course, some people have pushed real hard to count offline media — Google has apparently been interested in this Eyebox device which counts when people look at wall ads or billboards.