SuperPages Listens & Gives Advertisers Some SEO Love

This cheeky post – SuperPages New Profile Pages Not Doing Advertisers Any SEO Favors – caught the attention of James Johnson, Group Manager of Skunk Works (great title btw) over at Supermedia. James took my concerns back to his company and it looks like they are going to remove the nofollow tags only for links that they have reviewed, which is as it should be. He left the following comment on the post this morning:

Hey there.

Ok, we have this in our development queue. We have some pretty cool stuff for our clients that we’re working on ahead of this enhancement, a little bit of which I’ll plug below.

Currently this link goes through a tracking mechanism and not directly to the domain itself, so just removing the nofollow to a business’s link currently on the business profile will not have the benefit you’re implying. We will follow the link from the business profile’s verified domain to aid in search engine discovery of all of our clients who have a website.

We will do this for advertisers and not just any business profile. The reason why is this: These are businesses that we have an established realtionship with, have had some contact with, and have therefore had the opportunity to review the business’s website, information and content. It’s simply a good quality check for us to make sure we’re not linking to just anything and to avoid any increase in spam to the business profile setup here: http://www.supermedia.com/spportal/landingpages.do?splash=74&campaignId=cjbr

Businesses wanting to review their internet packages should call: (866) 311-4186

For businesses and their webmasters wanting a shorter click path from the homepage of Superpages.com to their business profile, they should enhance the content on their business profiles. It’s important to add as much content as possible for users of Superpages.com like enhancing the description, adding MULTIPLE pictures, adding the company’s logo, and getting their customer reviews on their business profile. Add content from the ‘Claim this Listing’ link on the business profile itself (just below the ‘info’ tab), or simply go here to get started: http://www.supermedia.com/spportal/landingpages.do?splash=74&campaignId=cjbr

The more content, the better for businesses. We use this content in MANY different ways and it is very much a part of our own ranking algorithm for users of Superpages.com, Switchboard.com and Localsearch.com ( http://blog.kelseygroup.com/index.php/2010/03/19/supermedia-debuts-relevancy-based-search/ ) and content amount and quality also factors into how we choose businesses to feature.

We’re also a trusted source for this information for Google local (including maps and pages), Yahoo local, Bing and MANY other outlets on the Internet and in a mobile environment. So distribution of your information to those sources and many others from Superpages.com is already taken care of, advertiser or not.

While ALL pieces of business profile content are extremely valuable for the business’s marketing campaign, here’s a tip – add coupons to your business profiles. We’re doing fun stuff with these:
( http://twitter.com/sp_dallas http://www.bing.com/maps/explore/?org=aj#5003/0.40326=k:coupon&o=&a=0/5872/style=auto&lat=32.799999&lon=-96.787003&z=11&pid=5874 )

and we are greatly expanding the distribution points and partners of coupons, so make sure when adding content to your business profiles, to include a promotion through coupon creation and we’ll include it in our current and yet to be released distribution channels. You can quickly set those up here: http://www.supermedia.com/spportal/business-listings/coupons and we’ll review it before distributing.

Will post back once this enhancement is live.

Cheers.

Nice work James and thanks for listening to a pesky blogger.

Side note to Supermedia: You can still track clicks and pass SEO juice through a link via the use of cookies. I believe you can also try using a cross-domain canonical tag on the URL you are redirecting by specifying the target URL as the canonical URL.

Side note to self: Perhaps I was a bit hasty in the pursuit of a great headline, but after reading James’ response and reflecting on this for more than ten seconds, the effort that Superpages is making to get better advertiser data on their profiles should help with SEO regardless of whether or not the links are nofollowed, as Superpages is an important source of citations for ranking in Google Maps/Local. Group hug anyone?