Google's Local Business Center a Serious Threat to Existing Online Yellow Pages Directories

If you click on the "Business Solutions" link on Google's homepage, you'll find information about the various revenue generating programs, advertising opportunities and productivity tools that Google offers to the general public. You will also find two separate text links to Google's Local Business Center displayed under the headings "Get listed on Google Maps" and "Put your information on Google".

And although Google's Local Business Center isn't billed as an online yellow pages directory, that's exactly what it is. Google now allows local business owners to add their business name, address, phone number, email address, website URL and business description to its business database. This information is then displayed, at no charge, on Google Maps, and more recently, Google's web search results.

As you may or may not have noticed, when you enter a business name, city and state into Google's web search form, the first thing displayed on the results page is a map with business listings from Google's database and links to more information. If you enter a keyword, along with a city and state, the first thing that appears in the results is a link entitled, "Local business results".

This free service could spell big trouble for competitors in the online yellow pages industry. Google's Local Business Center offers all of the business information that conventional Internet yellow pages sites do, and then some. In addition to business descriptions, hours of operation, online coupons, photos, maps, driving directions, and even business reviews, Google offers Internet users something that other online yellow pages can't – the convenience of searching for both yellow pages and web search results from a single form.

Add to that, the fact that Google's business data will likely be more complete, more trustworthy and more up-to-date than its competitors because it's published by the business owners themselves, and you've got a recipe for complete dominance of the Internet yellow pages industry. Current industry leaders like YellowPages.com, SuperPages and Switchboard will have to adapt quickly to their new competitor, or we may soon be closing the book on their online yellow pages directories.

About The Author

Erik M. Cunningham is an author, researcher and the founder of the YPdx Yellow Pages ( http://www.ypdx.com ) and has been working in the online yellow pages industry since 2002.


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Your Link Building Campaign Search for Quality or Search for Quantity?

If you’re new to internet marketing, one tip you may have heard around the internet is that quantity link building is a better campaign than quality link building. However, if you’ve been around the internet awhile you know that a good link building campaign is just the opposite. While it is important to get a good number of links pointing back to you, the quality of the link pointing back is much more vital.

The way to look at it is that a link is like a reference to your website. If you were collecting references for another job, would you try to collect 25 good references or a few really good references? It’s the same thing for your link building campaign. You want nothing but the best pointing back to your website.

Not only is it a waste of your time to get as many links as possible as oppose to focusing on quality link building, it can also be detrimental to your website. If you have hundreds of links of little value pointing to your website, the search engines may view your website as one with little value. Obviously there are a number of other considerations that search engines take into account, but the links pointing back to your website is certainly one of the criteria.

So how do you know if it is a quality link or not? There are a number of factors that you should take into consideration when starting your link building campaign. One of the most common factors is the link’s page rank. This is a great way to look for quality links because their page is ranked from the search engines. However, you want to look at the page rank of the page that your website will be on, not their home page. It does you no good to look at the page rank of their home page if your link will have no association to it.

Another consideration is how many links are already on the other person’s page. Most people set up a page specifically for links to other websites. It can be difficult at times, but during your link building campaigns you should try to find websites that have no more than 30 links on the page. The page rank for any given page is distributed among the number of links on the page. If you can find a page with 30 other links on it, you will receive 1/30th of the page rank for that page.

The last thing to consider during your link building campaign is whether you like the website or not. Just because a website doesn’t have the highest page rank doesn’t automatically make it a poor website. For all you know it could be a brand new website that will soon have a page rank of 6. The important thing is that you go with your gut instinct and base your link building campaign around quality links and not the quantity of links.

Article Source: http://www.articlesnatch.com
About the Author:Written by: Tom Dahne and Paul Martin Website: www.linkdirectory.com and www.bidonlinks.net Tom Dahne and Paul Martin are the owners of the very popular directory called Link Directory which is 100% SEO friendly and Human edited, and it accepts free and paid submissions for any quality website so feel free to submit your website today for inclusion.