Sensis lets search engines index Yellow Pages content!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 23 July 2008 11:06

Your IT - Home IT

Sensis says that to optimise its content for indexing by search engines, it needed to “construct a specially designed web page for every business listed in the online directory.”

Each of these pages is then assigned its own URL (or web address), which then “contains information such as the business' name, address, phone numbers and location on a map, as well as the capability for people to email the listing to a friend or send to their mobile phone.”

Sensis says that this “effectively provides a standalone page for each Yellow listing that can be served up in search engine results when a person conducts a search relevant to that business.”

Sensis’ Chris Smith added that: "Search engines point people to content so it's a logical progression to make our Yellow content, content currently used by over 9 million people per month, even more accessible.

"For our advertisers, their Yellow listing becomes more powerful as it has much greater reach than ever before. And for consumers using search engines to find local businesses, they now have access to Yellow's comprehensive database of local businesses."

Having a Sensis listing should also ensure you have a high placing in search results, or so it would seem from Smith’s remarks, where he says that “the popularity of the Yellow website and the way it had been built meant the new individual pages created for Yellow businesses carry a heavy weighting in terms of where they appear in the organic results on search engines.”

Smith continued: "Put simply, the fact [the Yellow website] is well known and used has a big impact in determining how high businesses listed in Yellow may appear in results on search engines.

"It can take a lot of time and effort for a small business to try and get a high ranking for their website in search results. Now by advertising with Yellow, a lot of the hard work has already been done.”

So it seems clear from Smith’s remarks that small businesses will be the ones to benefit most, especially those that don’t already have a website to speak of, or have a site that doesn’t have high rankings.

Is it a blow to sites like “True Local”? Continued on page 3.