If you want to create a brand name for your business this post might sound relevant to you else you can skip this. Business owners would promote their brand and business through multiple channels and hence create a likelihood of people searching your brand on search engines to know about your product and services. The search engine results would show few pages of yours and a lot more from classified sites like justdial , sulekha , yellow wages and a lot more.
Scenario 1
You are a paid customer at the classified site. Your expectation would be that these classifieds should refer their customers to your website and hence create business value for you. What actually happens is these sites are optimized extensively for your brand name as keyword, since your brand page is just one of the pages for them they can go overboard in stuffing keywords, heading tags etc (nothing to loose even if Google drops those pages in the search results), whereas its only an “about us” page amongst your other product or service pages to compete against the classified pages. The remaining pages are customised for individual products or services. As a result your one page competes with hundred other classified pages for searches happening on your brand, the user is guided to these classified pages as well and hence a chance that the classified site might send them to your competitors as well. One way to reduce this is by asking your classified partner to use “no follow”, ” no index” links since you are paying for your advertisement you should be forcing this clause into them. This will stop the crawlers to crawl those pages but would still work for humans and you get customers through these sites not the other way round.
Scenario 2
If you are not a paid customer and still have your pages on the classified sites the same holds true for you and you are definitely loosing some of your customers to your competitors. Since you are a free customer your listing is not going to be prominent amongst the paid advertisers, you would anyways not benefit from the customers at the classified sites. you should try that the free listing sites pull down your pages.
Few things that you should be careful while listing on classified sites:
- Ensure that the content you put up there including the page title, heading and description, avoid using much of your brand name esp the “title” which in most of these sites would be “h1” tag which has a great importance in Google search results.
- ORM – A solution to this lies in ORM (online reputation management). Through ORM you try to target your desired pages (could from your website or profiles on other platforms) to show on the first few results of the Google search targeted at your brand pages.
Even though we are a paid customer at Justdial we have got our pages removed from their site, besides various reasons this being one of the prominant reasons since it goes a step ahead to load our web pages in an iframe which kills our sites url visibility to the user, User will not be able to visit our website directly through our url
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