My Listing’s Gone… What Happened?

As part of our recent facelift, I outsourced the manual removal of some 1000+ small business listings to bring the site totally up to date and make it more consistent with what I feel my visitors expect to find.

There were four criteria used to “kill” these directory listings:

1. Listings without a web site - I don’t want a phone book… I want a small business web directory - so if your listing didn’t contain a URL to link to, it was killed. And when you think about it… people are on the ‘net to find out as much as they can about you… so if you don’t have a web site to go visit, are they really going to get in touch any other way? Unlikely.

2. Listings which created a “problem” with my web site thumbnail service - so if you had a web site, BUT it didn’t want to play properly and create a nice thumbnail to go with your listing, then it too was killed. These thumbnails are now very much a feature in the search results and the individual listings here at SBSN, and vastly improve the look and usefulness of the pages IMHO.

3. (Expired) Domains which were “parked” - often showing mostly those crappy PPC ads from Google and Overture - were also removed. In fact, about 25% of the listings removed were in this category. It’s becoming a real problem in the industry - see my rant about expired domains here.

4. Finally, wherever they were noticed during the process, duplicate listings and links to spammy sites were also removed.

So there you go - if your web site fitted any of those criteria, it was removed in the interests of improving the overall experience for other users of the Small Business Support Network.

If you want to be listed in our directory, and you have a web site with decent content on it that offers real value to your visitors, then please register here.