Blacklist of Useless citation sites

[Eric Rohrback]

Anyone have a blacklist of useless sites for local citation building? Examples could be those phone directory scraper sites or similar ones. Curious to see what sites people consider as useless to the cause when it comes to building up citations.

 

[Eric Rohrback]

Trying to bump this to get some feedback. I have an idea how to use this, but need some other opinions to start.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Hi Eric,

I'm not a citations specialist, but seems like that's going bottom up, instead of top down.

In other words most people I think focus on the majors. Probably submit to the aggregators, then maybe also use Yext or Moz Local. Then some might go a step further and search "KW City" to find out what top directories actually show up in Google. Then maybe the go-getters will seek out good industry related or city related directories. Then maybe check top competitor's to see if there are any good ones they missed.

Using any or all of those methods in my mind is going top down. Finding the best and then once you get so far down the list you see the quality go down and start running into funky ones like awesomebestbusinessesnearyou . com or "Yellowjello Business Directory". And you stop there knowing it's not worth the effort.

But the ones that would be on the black list I would think are those that I mentioned at the end above. They are sites no one would recognize or remember. Seems no one would start at the bottom and want to look at a list of citations to avoid. They would just go top down like I mentioned above???

But maybe I'm wrong. I don't do citations.

But Darren and other citations pros subscribe to the citations forum, so hopefully others will weigh in.

 

[painperdu]

It's hard to discount any citation source regardless of size because Google likes to surface unpredictable sources and there's always some off the wall directory showing up in the SERPs.

Using the top-down approach, as Linda states, makes the most sense but to blacklist small and uninteresting sites may not be prudent.

 

[Eric Rohrback]

Top down is easy and pretty well covered, which is what I usually do when building citations. What i'm thinking is establishing a way to automate the analysis and grade against a positive and negative scaling. My idea is to dump a huge list of found URLs, which then gets cross-referenced with a white list (top sites) and a black list (known spam sites). A lot of people have a template list of sites they automatically disavow, but now many have a list of known "local directories" that they avoid. I can make a judgement call if I import some stats, but wanted to see if I could crowd-source some well known ones.

 

[HurricaneK8]

My only worry with that approach is that people could use the blacklist for negative SEO

I have a list of citation sources that don't allow me to add clients anymore, but I'm not sure how useful that would be to other people. Usually you try once, and then remember not to use that source again. It's also not harmful, just annoying!

 

[Eric Rohrback]

Well... I suppose you could argue the opposite as well. If you have the same list someone tried to use against you, then it's pretty simple to disavow or try to get those links removed. Kind of a double edged sword. Once it's out there you can either use it for good or evil, but if you use it for evil then you're going to risk wasting a lot of your time. Kind of the same idea as the spam segment being sent around to combat Google Analytics spam. It's out there, people know about it, but now those sites aren't seeing the same results because they're in the open instead of in the shadows.

Maybe it's a lot of effort for a lower value product, but I thought it would be good to have a list of sites other professionals see as low value or harmful.

 

[heckler]

This might be an easier exercise if you have a specific segment in mind. Most of our NAP data ends up in places we would never put it (manually) anyway. So I'm not sure anything aside from seeding incorrect NAP data would be harmful (aka - negative SEO).

.02,

 

[Colan Nielsen]

Nyagoslav wrote this article a couple years ago and it seems like for the most part it is still relevant today - Business Directory Networks and Why You Should Be Aware of Them | NGS

This might help you save some time by helping understand which sites aren't worth paying attention to.