How businesses get local citations without submitting them?

[ChaseCameron]

How do some businesses get listed in directories like YellowBook, SuperPages, MerchantCircle, etc. without submitting their information.  For example, my dad's company listed themselves in YellowPages and Google Places years ago, but also show up in the ones listed above without having submitted the information to them or having paid anyone else to do it...

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Chase,

Both Wissam and Linda have done a great job of explaining how data in one place gets fed to many others. Do check out the link to David Mihm's graphic. It's excellent.

[LindaBuquet]

Chase, Wissam's link will help a lot.

But in general many citations, stem from the yellow pages. Many mature businesses I've worked with have never submitted a single citation, yet have 50,000 or more.

If they've been listed in the phone book, it propagates out from there. Many directories scrape the online yellow pages, then other directories scrape those directories. Plus you'll see in David Mihm's visual, many of the back end data providers get phone book data and business listings, then feed the info out to tons of other sites.

[wissamdandan]

here is a piece of information collected by David Mihm That lets you understand that when submitting to a few other might "take" or aggregate the new info

Local Ecosystem: http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/seo-industry/local-search-ecosystem-2012