Whenever I run into the guys from Yellowbot (aka Solfo) at a local search conference, the exchange is typically something like “hard to believe we are at another one of these things…”. In other words, Erron, Emad and the gang have been at the Local game a long time. I was surprised when Matt Booth jumped the BIA Kelsey ship to join as their CEO. While I had always thought that the Yellowbot team had done some quite interesting stuff with reputation…
National IYPs (Internet Yellow Pages) have long been amongst the biggest benefactors of organic search engine traffic. The typical IYP has north of 15MM business listings. Add category pages, city pages, reviews, maps, etc and you are easily looking at a 50MM+ page site with a huge amount of high value & high volume keyword targets. Many IYPs even use their Google rankings as part of their sales pitch. When I got an email from one asking me to advertise…
My bud Ahmed has put together a list of the top IYPs in the US based on reach derived from Google’s stats. Nothing too surprising except that Citysearch is #1. I also think there are a number of sites missing from the list – 50states for example. But still good info for all you local search obsessed freaks out there.
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…
This isn’t so much a continuation of Yellowbot’s yellow pages seo analysis I wrote about last week as it is a re-examination of the point I brought up regarding Yellowbot’s elimination of category hierarchies.
Yellowbot made a big splash in the local search world earlier this year when they launched and grew very quickly for a site that was basically just a directory of businesses and service categories. Within three months of its launch the site reportedly had somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 monthly visitors.