Local Link Selling: Should You Do It?

Writing by Brick Marketing on Friday, 16 of November , 2007 at 10:06 am

Should you sell advertising on your local small business website?

That’s a good question. By now, everyone knows about Google’s policy of penalizing websites that sell links. What no one has talked about yet is how that will affect local websites, particularly local directory websites that make their money selling links. I don’t expect this policy to affect websites like Citysearch, Yellowpages.com, and Superpages. I mean the locally owned website that acts as a business directory for a particular local area.

The unique advantage to these types of websites is that they are locally owned and therefore have the ability to earn trust from their neighbors. This is where such sites have an edge over their larger, more ubiquitous competitors. But will Google’s paid links policy penalize these sites?

A true directory will sell advertising to any business within a specific geographic area. These sites will have to be optimized for geotargeted keywords in order to be successful. With the rise in local search, and it will only grow more popular, it makes no sense for Google to penalize these sites at all. They are, after all, directories. Directories have a special place in online marketing and should follow a different set of rules. We’ve seen that with article directories. Why should it be any different for local business directories?

It remains to be seen whether these local directories will be penalized for selling links. But I would attempt to persuade Google not to institute such penalties and I would encourage local businesses to continue patronizing their locally owned directories even if they are penalized. After all, the true benefit of such directories is not the PageRank they offer, if any, but the targeted traffic they can send to your website.

Category: Local Online Advertising

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