Category: Yahoo Local

I always get them confused… Now that Marissa Mayer is taking the helm at Yahoo!, I wonder if this means Yahoo Local is going to get some much-needed attention. A few years ago, an insider told me that Yahoo Local got nine million daily visits just from Google. That number has almost certainly declined, but I’ve got to believe the service still gets substantial traffic from search engines, third party sites and Yahoo properties. There’s so much potential there and…

I was just perusing Rafat Ali’s Reinventing Yahoo post where he recommends that Yahoo should buy TripAdvisor as the first step in a strategy to redefine itself as the “people-powered listings business”. He then goes on to suggest Yelp, HomeAway, OpenTable, Trulia (home of ex-Yahoo Local GM Paul Levine btw) and Zillow as other potential acquisitions. The idea being: “This plan leverages its user base, still the second largest in the world, to build its future. It allows Yahoo to…

Update: Matt Mcgee informs me that this is way old news.  Still interesting though. First CityGrid and now Yahoo!?  What’s Yelp up to? A reader from a daily deals site just asked me why Yelp was linking to Yahoo on the bottom right of this URL with the words “New York Burgers” in the anchor text. Upon further exploration, I found similar links on every business profile page I checked.  And if you search Google, you can find millions of…

I just sent an email out to a bunch of local seo types and saw this on the “message sent” confirmation screen:

UPDATE 6/16/10: OK, maybe I was a bit off on this one 😛 see http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/16/aol-to-sell-bebo-for-around-10-million/ Yahoo finally closed Geocities.com in a way that proves Carol Bartz & co. really shouldn’t be focused on search – they just destroyed millions of dollars worth of PageRank in one fell swoop.

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…

Actually this conference was Steve Espinosa’s brainchild but he has brought in a bunch of luminaries including Greg Sterling, Atif Rafik of Yahoo Local & Steve Stukenborg of Google TV.  There will be a number of other local search rock stars including David Mihm, Will Scott, Gib Olander of Localeze, Mike Boland of the Kelsey Group, Court Cunningham from Yodel and more, including yours truly. Local Search Summit is on July 17th, 2009 at the JW Marriot in San Francisco,…

When Best of the Web Local launched in August, I thought it was yet another wakeup call to Yellow Pages companies (both print and IYPs) that their business was under attack.  There are already thousands of IYP type sites out there, but when an established domain like BOTW.org launches one and combines that with the relationship it already has with small businesses, they can start to take both traffic and advertiser share away from the incumbents, even the start-up incumbents.…

When I started at InsiderPages, Yelp didn’t exist, but there was this service called AngiesList that we were obsessed with. AngiesList was a pioneer in figuring out how to get contractor reviews and ratings out of people. Back in the day, InsiderPages made a splash by giving out $5 Starbucks cards for five business reviews.  One of our then-rivals, Judysbook, came out with a promotion to give away iPods for 100 reviews.  Then Yahoo Local came out with giving away…

There’s a minor commotion going on in the comments section of my popular post on how to update your yellow pages listings for free.   One of my readers has been talking to Localeze about their service to bulk update businesses with thousands of locations across a large number of local search sites, and wondering if it’s worth it. My initial assumption is that most of the big local search sites (and the little ones) would rather get their data…