Are Yellow Pages links good for SEO

[donsilvernail]

I have a client that has 2500 yellowpages.com links like this one http://m.yellowpages.com/hillside-nj/guardianship-services Are these SEO relevant? Can they hurt SEO efforts. Is this something should push for clients? Can Yellow pages be a good link building strategy? What say you?

[DavidMeshah]

These links are coming from when a business advertises with Yellowpages.com. I have seen evidence that they are destroying one of my clients NAP's because each link is coming from a different city that the local business doesn't belong to them. Have your client Stop advertising with them immediately and disavow all links just to be safe.

[JordanRailsback]

Without having the client's site to be able to check, I'd guess that the reason you're not seeing these links popping up within Open Site Explorer is due to the size of Yellow Pages' site in conjunction with the way that we compile our index.

When we crawl through a site during the indexing process, we limit the number of pages that we'll crawl on a single domain in order to help us sample a broader and more diverse link landscape (or Mozscape, if you will ). There are a few million pages on Yellow Pages' domain, and since we elect to cap out indexing a single domain around ~50,000 pages (I'm uncertain of the exact value), only a relative handful of the most prominent pages on the domain would be included to avoid index saturation. I hope this helps to explain what you're seeing there!

[donsilvernail]

Hi Miriam,

What a great question. Yellowpages.com has linked to individual blog posts on my clients site from each town listing in New Jersey.  I have like 70 posts on the site and there are like 550 twps. in New Jersey so there you go.

They don't show up in my Moz Analytics or open site explorer. I see these links in google search console. I imagine that these are no follow?

Thanks

[MiriamEllis]

Hey Donald,

YP can be a good citation for a local business but I am puzzled by the sheer number of links you've found - 2500? Most businesses would not have 2500 listings (unless they are McDonald's or something like that). What is the origin of this many links from a single entity?

[aarongray]

Hi Donald,

I normally stay away from yellowpages as google can see this as spam and even more so when you have 2500 coming from one site. I normally disavow them altogether. If they acted like a other local listing sites and didn't give so many links it's fine but yellowpages is known to do this for sure.

Local Citations can be a great part of your link building but you need to be careful and insure its done right. Here is a page Moz has put together https://moz.com/learn/local/listings about local listing/citations and why you should do them and how to get started.

Hope this helps.