superpagesHere’s a wonderful article by Andrew Shortland on the results of a test he did on IYP SEO Rankings Report 2009. Here’s what he did.

Andrew started by searching Google (with personalization turned off) for 20 of the top yellow pages headings in the top 20 U.S. cities.

Each query was in the following format – <City>+<Category> (e.g. “Chicago Doctor”)

Each top 10 ranking was scored in reverse order, so a #1 ranking = 10 points, a #2 ranking = 9 points, etc.

The points for each IYP were added up and averaged across all queries for all cities.  The IYP with the most points was crowned American IYP SEO Idol of 2009.

Here’s a quick synopsis of his results

  1. Superpages
  2. Citysearch
  3. Yelp
  4. Yahoo Local
  5. InsiderPages
  6. YellowPages.com
  7. BizJournals
  8. AreaConnect
  9. MagicYellow
  10. Switchboard
  11. MerchantCircle
  12. GetFave
  13. Yellowbot
  14. Yellowpages.Lycos.com
  15. Kudzu
  16. Discoverourtown
  17. Loqal.com
  18. Local.Ingenio.com
  19. YellowUSA.com
  20. IAF.net

Alexa Ranking For Most Popular SEO IYP’s

As a side note, If you’re interested in the Alexa Rankings for Andrew’s top SEO IYPs of 2009, here they are. Alexa ranking is a good indicator of how popular a site is on the Internet. The lower the number, the more popular the site.

2. Yahoo Local
356. Yelp
663. YellowPages.com
940. Citysearch
1,018. Superpages
1,165. MerchantCircle
1,837. BizJournals
1,912. Yellowpages.Lycos.com
3,800. InsiderPages
5,655. Switchboard
6,020. AreaConnect
9,141. Yellowbot
9,744. GetFave
11,388. MagicYellow
14,896. YellowUSA.com
16,653. Kudzu
23,261. Discoverourtown
33,195. IAF.net
57,680. Local.Ingenio.com
160,785. Loqal.com

What’s The Take-Away?

After reading the results of Andrew’s experiment, I came to the initial conclusion that these are the most important Internet Yellow Page sites on the Internet; the sites where we need to place our time and attention. But after some additional mental processing, I concluded that the results will change for every business based on where they’re located and what industry they represent.

The take-away is this. Even though the results of this experiment showed the top 20 most powerful IYP’s using a national study, the only results that really matter are the results for your business. You may discover that sites like Yelp are City Search do not play an important factor in your business.

Here’s an article I wrote that will show you how to determine which of the IYP sites are the most important for your business. It’s entitled: The Most Powerful Referral Sites For Your Business

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