ShieldPower = SEO Power: Supermedia's Local Linkbuilding Game

Supermedia just announced that they will be licensing their Superguarantee shield logo to advertisers. From the press release:

SuperMedia LLC recently launched ShieldPower, a new licensing program for SuperGuarantee businesses, making it even easier for consumers to spot the ‘Good Guys.’ Qualified businesses can now leverage the power of the SuperGuarantee Shield and use it on their Web sites, company vehicles, business cards, uniforms and more.

From Sebastien Provencher:

I like the idea that SuperMedia is now building a new trusted brand/logo that advertisers can use (really a seal of approval) given the commoditizing of the Yellow Pages logo in the US. Good move.

This program is smart for a variety of reasons but since some of us choose to divide the world into either good for SEO or bad for SEO, let’s put this one in the great for SEO column. If anyone sees one of these Shieldpower logos in the wild on a SMB site let me know. I’d love to see how they are using these to get links from SMB sites back to superpages.com.

The other thing I like about this is that it’s kind of a reverse paid link program. Instead of Superpages buying links on SMB sites it looks as if the SMBs will actually be paying to link back to Superpages.com (first year is free though). Brilliant!

Attention other Yellow Pages co’s, where’s your trusted badge/link strategy?

Here’s another version of this idea from Angieslist

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9 Response Comments

Stever March 25, 2010 at 2:25 pm

Kind of like how some IYP’s resell Adwords and use the businesses profile page on the IYP site as the landing page. Essentially getting the businesses to pay to drive traffic to the IYP site. Brilliantly deceitful.
Tim Coleman March 25, 2010 at 2:40 pm

They’ve been at the utters of this link building cow from the beginning. Every site they have ever created for an SMB has linked back to superpages. Now they go so far as to add the anchor text yellow pages to the link.

Here’s an example: bottom right of the page.

http://acplumbingheatinginc.com/
Andrew Shotland March 25, 2010 at 3:20 pm

Thanks Tim but I am pretty sure that the AC Plumbing site is a site that has been built by Superpages. This is still effective SEO-wise, but I think the new thinking behind the Superguarantee thing is that they are going after all those sites that are not hosted by Supermedia.
Mike Stewart March 25, 2010 at 4:09 pm

Although, I will admit that I knew this was coming down the pipe, I agree… it is a very smart SEO move. The challenge of previously only branding the sites the company created via HOSTOPIA/NETOPIA Motorola CMS was that they are not the best looking. By incorporating your brand on better looking sites, I see it also as a branding improvement. Now if only the company would cease claiming development credits for sites it builds that are not very attractive. Doesn’t help sales consultants sell when the sites clients review on SuperPages.com look unattractive. Let’s see how consumers respond to the companies branding efforts. Advertisers do not appear to be responding well related to the companies online reputation.
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Local SEO March 30, 2010 at 7:29 am

I remember a program going back to 2000 that was very similar. It wasn’t yellow page related-if memory serves it was a “we don’t spam” logo. Very effective for pushing the org that created it to a PR 7 in no time flat.

Things are a bit different now but the same tactics are still in play. I am going to go into more detail about this on http://localseo.org over the next few days.
Chris Silver Smith April 2, 2010 at 1:35 pm

Here’s one supershield in the wild:

http://www.allemangconcrete.com/Allemang_concrete_contact.htm

However, I don’t think that’s the official shield badge – there are lots of cases of web designers incorporating unofficial versions into SMB websites.

Superpages has been using similar kinds of badges for quite some time. For instance, their business ratings badges which were, ahem, developed by my team back when I was there:

http://www.superpages.com/ratings_badges/search_page.html
KlintR April 6, 2010 at 4:09 pm

Here’s another one in the wild I found Andrew.
http://www.advancedcomputerrepair.com/
küpoyun April 22, 2010 at 1:37 am

thanks a lot of