I thought it would be interesting to review the Quantcast data for the local-oriented sites in Quantcast’s Top 100 to see if anything has changed (of course take this data with a grain of salt) since the Google Farmer Update:
Update: Some readers pointed out the non-Quantified sites I used were not showing the right data so I took down charts for Yellowpages.com, Weather.com, Yelp, Craigslist & Weatherbug. In fact I have been told by Yellowpages.com that their traffic when up post-Farmer. Sorry about that guys. #bloggers
Winners
City-Data.com + (unbelievable!)
No Change
Examiner.com (no change)
Losers
Manta.com –
14 Response Comments
I never really thought of the local sites as content farms, certainly thin on content, but often found what I was looking for when those pages came up.
Weather.com is an example. Sure the pages are loaded w/ads and other fluff, but I’m typically seeking weather related info and have even found myself checking moon related info (especially when planning camping trips).
The local sites that serve up nothing but listings, we’ve all probably felt they needed to do something about that anyways, or eventually suffer Google’s wrath.
The weather sites are notorious for creating large amounts of thin content pages that target super long-tail queries. Also, not sure if this is pervasive, but check out the multiple anchor text links on this page for “Los Angeles” and “L.A.” http://www.weather.com/common/drilldown/US/top100.html
Wow thats interesting. I thought Yelp was a winner but it appears not. In the bay area service niche Yelp is crushing it…
Yelp has always had strong Bay Area rankings because of its start here.
Right, more so now I would argue 🙂
It is hard to fathom Yelp not being as dominant in other areas (I’m also from SF/SJ). Try using Craigslist outside of SF/NY – you get 1/20th the results.
nice set of analytics here Andrew…and while Yelp has suffered up here in .ca land too, I still see TONS of their reviews in GooglePlaces – notwithstanding the latest salvo fired at them by G to either “buy in or get out” of the index….
don’t have any stats up here for ypg.ca…but I suspect that like the US version, they too took hits…and as far as Manta goes, it’s a simple dbase site that IMHO just tries to ram linkjuice back at it’s listings….almost all of which I understand were suppied I think by Axiom? dunno if I have that right…but they buy the dbase and then pub same as far as I know…
in any event, kudos for G for even attempting to get this cull started via their Farmer Update!!!
🙂
Jim
Yelp directory pages are now populating top spots in the local listings. This is new. “counseling san francisco” & “psychologist san francisco” are examples. Yelp is not a local business. Oh….I see why….a counselor used yelp.com as their own URL. Nice one! Don’t have a website and want to rank #1 these days? Just put yelp.com in there. Gotta love it.
The first one should be city-data.com, not citydata.com – right?
corrected. tx
Hi Andrew,
Do you know if sites which syndicate their reviews to other domains (i.e. citysearch – insiderpages – superpages) were hit – and to what extend? The usual tools aren’t really helping me.
Jonas,
I don’t know, but my guess is that those sites were not hit because they have a lot of original content (i.e. reviews).
Really nice and informative. I am curious about citydata.com how they performing so well?
Hey, Andrew! What about article directories such as ezinearticles? I think that they doesn’t like new Farmer Update 🙂