Most of the stories involve YP reps misleading people by making some of the following claims (lies):

YP rep: “If you do not sign up with us again this year, you will disappear from the Google rankings. We work together with Google on the organic listings. In fact, we have official Google staff working right here in our office, they make sure that all YellowPages clients get better rankings. Cancel your contract and see what happens to your rankings.”

Misleading, bullying and scaring people into signing up for a “service” for which real ROI is very hard to track and where more often than not, clients pay an absolute premium for terribly poor results, compared to other available online advertising possibilities. Have a look at the following set of screenshots which I took from several SEO clients who are currently locked in with Yellowpages Advertising contracts. These are all from the last 30 days.

Yellowpages.com.au accounted for 1.16% in the last 30 days according to Google Analytics. Google sent our client 62.49% of their total traffic.

This client got 1.23% traffic from YP over the past 30 days. Google was responsible for 77.50%

Here we see 53.42% organic traffic from Google. 19.39% PPC (Adwords) traffic from Google and then there’s 1.07% coming from Yellowpages.

I could go on and make a really long list of screenshots because I have access to over 800 client profiles, but I hope you get the picture. Google Search is the new Yellow Pages and companies should really shift their marketing budget in order to stay in touch with their target market.

The biggest concern I have is that for the above “results”, clients have told me they’ve been paying Yellowpages anywhere from 8,000 to 38,000 AUD per year. If businesses were willing to move that budget towards search engine optimisation and search engine marketing, their sales would go through the roof, quite literally.

Wake up business people; The Yellow Pages is an online dinosaur and their inevitable demise is only getting prolonged by those of you who still bottle-feed them the biggest chunks from your valuable marketing budget.

Interesting (hand picked) reads across the web about Yellow Pages Advertising:

• Yellow Pages Scam – The Google Partnership
• SEO through YellowPages Online?

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Google has since offered a “solution” with their link disavow tool. Basically all you need to do is figure out which bad links might cause a problem for your site’s ranking and add them to a txt file which you submit to Google. They take the information you submit as a strong suggestion and not a directive.

Here’s the format Google suggests we use:

Here are five ways to find as many links pointing to your domain:

1. Google Webmaster Tools is the best place to start looking. Once you’re signed in (and verified your domain) you click on Traffic and then the Links to your site section. From here you can download a CSV file with all the links Google is willing to show you.
2. Majestic SEO is probably the next big tool for you to find those bad links. Not free but well worth it. I recommend that you create a report with the Historic Index option. That way you’ll be able to get the bigger picture. Even if certain links are already gone, its a good precaution to add repeat offenders to the naughty list.
3. Open Site Explorer can help you find links that might have been overlooked by the previous two tools. Remember, you want to make sure you get as many data sets as you can in order to eliminate the largest number of spam links.
4. Google can also assist. Simply copy and paste certain sentences from your homepage into Google like so:”this is text from my homepage. It should be unique, so any results popping up in Google which aren’t my domain are probably scraper sites“. It’s safe to assume that whatever site has identical copy has been scraping your site and linking back to it.
5. Bing Webmaster Toolbox is very similar to Google Webmaster Tools. Once you’re logged in and added your site, go to the Reports & Data section and click on Inbound Links. Here you will find every link Bing is willing to share with you. I suggest you export the ones pointing to your root domain.

Once you’ve compiled all the inbound links into once spreadsheet, filter out the ones that you feel are spam or simply don’t want associated with your site and add them to the txt file. Once again, Google will review the links that you submit and treat it as a strong suggestion to disavow, not as a directive.

Eventually this tool should help Google identify bad links and clean up a large part of it. Remember, you’re not the only one submitting spam and certain sites will get flagged a lot so they’ll most likely get disavowed for every site they’re linking to, saving the next webmaster from having to go through all this again.

Some additional reading about the Google disavow tool:

• The Disavow Tool Works! Real Sites, Real Recoveries!
• Will the Google Disavow Tool Hurt More Businesses Than It Will Help?
• Google Link Disavow Tool: The Complete Guide
• Will Google’s Link Disavow Tool Come Back To Haunt Webmasters?

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I’ll share what I’ve found and how I use the tools. This list will most likely grow longer over time, so I suggest you bookmark this page for future reference.

Accounting Tools

1. Keeping on top of invoices started to become a real pain once I began to service over ten clients per month. Suddenly the invoice feature in PayPal simply wasn’t efficient enough anymore. Looking for a semi-automated billing solution, I came across Freshbooks and I’m happy to say I haven’t looked back since! Our clients now get automated invoices and reminders if they forget to pay. Besides great features, the system is brand-able, easy to use, plays nice with loads of other apps and comes with an API to boot.
2. Besides invoicing for services rendered, I wanted to get a better idea of what sort of money was going to come in in the near future. This is where I found Capsule CRM which is a nice and simply CRM to manage any deals or leads I have for the business.

Project Management Tools

1. By far the biggest challenge to get right is client communication and managing their expectations. Basecamp as an online project management tool has really helped to make the working relationship with our clients transparent. They have access to their projects at any time and can follow progress step by step, which really helps getting things right the first time around.
2. For internal project management with the developers and designers, we needed something with a bit more oomph than what Basecamp could provide. We tried Trello, which is a really neat visual project tracker. Smartsheet, a system that only spreadsheet junkies will really love, but then settled for Wrike, which seemed to be the most “boring” but functional one out of the three. Their projects-in-folders approach feels like the most natural way to organize clients and projects. Also integrates seamlessly with Google Docs

Digital Marketing Tools

1. Because the biggest part of the business involves SEO work, Raven Internet Marketing Tools has been fundamental in managing link building campaigns, tracking improvements and creating reports for our clients. Part of the workflow is to have reports generated every month and automatically emailed into the client’s Basecamp project.
2. Another big help is being a Pro member of SEOmoz. The SEO toolset that they provide you with goes a long way in analysing and optimising client’s sites. Access to their Open Site Explorer tool is included.
3. For serious link profile research, you can’t pass MajesticSEO without selling yourself short. One of those “must have” tools in your SEO arsenal.
4. Making your SEO life a bit easier is something SEMrush does with their competitor research toolkit. This tool has provided us and our clients with so many “quick win” opportunities, SEMrush is one of the monthly fees that I pay with a smile on my face. 

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Some of you might have noticed that we’re running our site on Google’s blogger.com, or blogspot.com.au and are wondering why? Surely a Digital Agency such as The Lot is Internet savvy enough to run their own website on WordPress or a similar CMS and on their own hosting? In short – yes, we are.

So here’s eight reasons to explain why we’ve opted to go with Blogger instead of the more traditional WordPress hosting.

Our Top Eight Reasons to use Blogger vs WordPress

1. It saves enormous amounts of time because we’re not constantly upgrading, installing and tweaking plugins like we have been doing for years on the WordPress platform.
2. We’re trying to minimize distractions for our visitors and offer nothing but great content to read. No bells and whistles needed.
3. Blogger runs on the Google infrastructure – have you EVER experienced downtime with any of the Google products? If you have, you’ll probably end up winning the lottery one day, or get struck by lightning.
4. It integrates beautifully with some of the online software which we consider to be the backbone of operating our online business, Google Apps for example. Once again, less is more.
5. It’s different. After years of doing what most others are doing, we took on the challenge to see if we could do just as well with a free Blogger site. So far, so good!
6. Blogger has grown up and now has (nearly) all of the SEO options that a professional SEO could wish for.
7. We’re confident that Google is only getting better at what they do and soon it won’t really matter what sort of technical tricks you’re trying to play – it’ll ALL be about the relevancy of your content.
8. We’re simply Google fan-boys (and girls!)

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