don f.

Complete scam. Who even uses the yellow pages anymore when it is so much quicker and easier to google something.

Yellowpages is scraping content and buying content from all over the place to build up their listing database. The problem is, google penalizes the average website owner if they scrape content and display it on their site, so why isn't google penalizing the bigger companies like yellow pages, yelp, yext, etc.?

If I cannot scrape content from other sites and display it on my site, then yellowpages and other business directory sites should not be allowed to either.

Why can one company scrape content and be listed on google, and not others?

So to get back to my initial complaint, I have found our business listing on yellowpagecity.com and all of their other sites that have different names but ones they own also. I went through the process of claiming the listing and was under the impression we would be getting an email and phone call for verification according to the site messages after going through the update process, then a week passes so I called them and was told very rudely that we would not receive a call for 4 weeks to verify the information and then they only update the listings twice a year and we would have to wait 6 months for the changes to take effect.

The problem with this is that google maps is now checking local citations across the web to make sure the company name, address, phone number etc all match and if they do not then google will give you a demerit or negative rank for your site because your local contact information is inconsistent. However this does not affect organic results but our efforts in marketing on google maps is being negatively impacted by the practices of yellowpagecity.com. I am currently working on a list of over 100 local business directories that our company is listed on and have not had any issues claiming and/or updating our content in a timely manner.

Yellowpagecity.com obtained our information without our authorization and they are displaying it on their site incorrectly and illegally as far as I am concerned and for them to tell us it will take 6 months to update it and in the mean time we have to deal with negative ranking factors from google maps because they are holding our listing hostage that we never created in the first place?

This practice needs to be stopped and this company needs to be held accountable for the millions of businesses it has in their database that are possibly also being held hostage and receiving negative ranking factors.