Half Of Small Businesses Never Update Their Listings Online

It would probably be easier if 99.9% of the pretty much worthless web directories closed down instead.......

This doesn't surprise me one bit. I was dealing with a new client only a few months ago (providing SEO services to an estate agent) and they were really urgently wanting me to improve the ranking of their Google Local business listing.

This is what they said was ranking best for their targeted keywords so far and was bringing them in lots of business. It came as quite a shock when I pointed out that whoever had set up this listing had entered the wrong address on the listing. Nobody had noticed this for over 3 years!

Well that would probably wipe out my online exposure campaign, and leave me listed in one proper directory.

I have the same problem with a number of online directory listings I have, But it's because they still have my old address listed as I couldn't remember the login details I used for each directory, therefore couldn't edit my details.

Problem is there so many directory scripts out there, anyone can start one in minutes. The you have another piece of internet rubbish full of degrading data. There also scripts that are set to scrape public directory data, re-package and then display under a new URL, obviously with adverts etc. We get scraped daily, and our system now auto blocks IP's that look at too many pages too quickly, plus alerts if we have too many visits from a single IP, but they still get through. We have a good fix though, as we overlay with 0843 numbers, which also get scraped, so happy days..

Unfortunately a lot of business listings are registered by seo companies and not business owners. The majority of SEO peeps based in countries that serve up a cracking curry or specialise in noodles aren't to particular in getting details correct, or tend to consistently duplicate. We auto and manually delete literally 100's of listings a day from our UK and US directories, all of which are generated from 3rd rate SEO companies. The sad thing is someone is paying them to do this, so some poor mug thinks they are getting a good service, as they get a list of the 100's of directories they are put on, but any half decent directory will simply delete them.


This is an interesting one and I've spoke to loads of directories over the years trying to find a way round this. Market Location are a company that have tried to tackle this, and you update with them, and your details are amended on their network, which is loads of directories from Thomsons to small ones. But there's no email address details, so we're not interested in the data.

One new idea is from a provider called telnames, and they are positioning themselves as a one stop provider, and we have agreed in principle to taking their data feed, who are sending data to Yahoo, Bing, BT and others. A service in the States called Yext is trying to tackle the same problem and is slowly growing in popularity.

There are all sorts of issues around data protection, individual website T&C's, and I gave up any ideas of trying to fix it ages ago. Whoever cracks it will be a wealthy person!

Yeah this was similar to the problem that my client had at the time too. It turned out that Thompson Local or Yellow Pages, can't remember which, seemed to run some sort of service where they registered Google Local listings for businesses. Therefore they didn't have the details to access the listings and change them their self.