There’s a minor commotion going on in the comments section of my popular post on how to update your yellow pages listings for free. One of my readers has been talking to Localeze about their service to bulk update businesses with thousands of locations across a large number of local search sites, and wondering if it’s worth it.
My initial assumption is that most of the big local search sites (and the little ones) would rather get their data from as few sources as possible for both quality and convenience.
For example, Google Maps is seeing a huge amount of mapspam via the bulk upload feature according to SearchEngineLand.
Seven reports (32%) seem to highlight an abuse of the bulk upload feature. Five (23%) indicate instances where a competitor seems to have hijacked a particular business record. Classifying the remaining 10 is a bit more tricky, but all involve false location data of some kind.
And Yahoo also seems to like dealing with only large data providers according to this interview between Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting and Frazier Miller of Yahoo Local.
Eric Enge: Right. So, if you are a business and, for example, you have more than a hundred locations, what is the smartest way for them to manage this relatively confusing situation?
Frazier Miller: I think it comes down to making sure that the core data providers, like InfoUSA, Axiom, and Localeze, are up-to-date.
They are super eager to work with you. They have a business model and they can go and charge folks like us to handle these feeds for free for the business. And then, we get the feeds directly. For a lot of these businesses, it is not just about Yahoo, it is about yellowpages.com, and Superpages, and Google, and a whole set of directories.
So again, I think that is a smart way for businesses to go about keeping their data up to date, whether it is an individual business or a chain. And then, with regard to us entering into a paid relationship, we are certainly a leader in the marketplace and continue to command a lot of market share.
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