Category: SEO M&A

The news that IAC’s Home Advisor is merging with Angie’s List to form a new public company is both surprising and not all that surprising. In InsiderPages’ early days, we considered Angie’s List one of our top competitors but we were always baffled why anyone would pay to get access to their members’ reviews, particularly when sites like ours and Yelp’s were giving the content away for free. Back then Angie had the last laugh, as InsiderPages got acquired by…

According to TechCrunch, AT&T’s Yellowpages.com paid $3,850,000 for the YP.com domain when they purchased it from LiveDeal last month.  Here’s the SEC filing. So what does this mean for you?  My guess is there was not a lot to the YP.com domain other than its ability to rank for different searches around the term “yellow pages”. Here’s some data from the Google Adwords Keyword Tool for the avg. monthly search volume, cpc and est Google Rank of Yp.com for some…

We have a winner for the quiz on how Centro screwed up the purchase of Real Cities by not talking to a SEO professional first.  Actually we have multiple winners. Shane identified that Centro neglected to redirect a large number of subpages from RealCities.com Shimon noted that Centro is doing a funky chain redirect – a 301 from http://realcities.com to http://www.centro.net/realcities then a 302(!) to http://www.centro.net/realcities/ While the damage is likely not permanent, and it may be that the RealCities…

Can you tell how Centro screwed up its purchase of RealCities from McClatchy?  A clean link with the anchor text of your choice (within reason) to the first reader who figures it out. Tip to Greg Sterling as always for alerting to me to this news.  Have a great vacation Greg.

Got to this one a bit late: ShoeMoney says if you buy a lot of domains for SEO don’t 301 redirect them all at once as this could send up a flag to the search engines.  301 them over time. Jeremy Wright of b5 media  – a blog network of about 700 sites Metrics for Buying Sites: Revenue potential Existing traffic, uniques, revenue, feed subscribers, page rank Age of site, stability, age of domain, amount of content, existing SEO metrics,…

Since I am now trading in local search gossip and innuendo (maybe I should turn this blog into Valleywag Local), I thought you might be interested in a little Twitter-based speculation. I just noticed on Emad Fanous’ Twitter Page that he is now “in the city of brotherly love”.  Now this could be a Tweet that is not meant to be taken literally, but let’s not go that route.  This is a family-friendly blog after all. So why would someone…

Might as well pile on the Microsoft/Yahoo bandwagon and add my $0.02. In a previous post on the new & improved Google local search results I implied that certain Yellow Pages companies might be getting a little agida at the prospect of Google pushing their sites farther down in the organic search results listings. Now with the news that Microsoft may be acquiring Yahoo that agida might turn into more of an ulcer. In short, this means a consolidation of…

Yesterday D&B announced that it had purchased Allbusiness.com for $55 million. While the business as is may in fact be worth $55 million the acquisitor usually pays based on what they believe the future value of the acquired business will be. Part of that future value is based on what the acquirer thinks it can do with the business (e.g. cut costs, increase sales, etc.). But in this day and age if you are buying a web property and not…