Hot take: paying for those business listing services is mostly a scam

I used to pay $99 a month to some company that claimed they'd get my BBQ popup listed on every directory in Detroit. Found out last week from a friend who runs a web dev shop that most of those listings never get indexed by Google anyway. He showed me his own audit where only 3 out of 18 listings from one of those services showed up in search results. I cancelled my subscription right after that. Has anyone else actually checked if their paid listings are working?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_wesley10d ago

Whoa, I actually read a study a while back from some SEO blogger who tested this exact thing. He paid for a bunch of listings on like 10 different services and only 2 of them ever appeared in Google searches after 6 months. The rest were basically dead links or pages Google ignored. I remember one local bakery in his test paid a service to get listed on those yellow pages clones and nothing happened. Your friend's audit sounds pretty spot on from what I've seen around. Take it with a grain of salt though, maybe some services work better for certain types of businesses than others.

fiona_sullivan299d ago

So basically we're paying these companies to yell into a void and hope Google hears us? Sounds about right for the internet in 2024. My cousin runs a taco truck and paid one of those services $200 a month for a year before realizing he was just funding someone's Netflix subscription. The audit part kills me though, 3 out of 18 is rough. I'd be demanding a refund for the 15 ghosts they left floating around the web.