Yelp, Merchant Circle, Insider Pages, Hot Frog...

[Supafly]

Do any of you build backlinks to business listings in directories such as Yelp, Merchant Circle and the others? For example, if you have a business listed in Yelp, would you build backlinks to your Yelp page in order to get it ranked along with your landing page? Would be nice to have your home page, Yelp listing and Merchant Circle listing all showing up on the first page of a Google search for your keyword. Do you know of any examples of this you can point to?

Does Google try to limit the number of page one listings for one particular business?

I see directory listings for some businesses showing up on the first page, but I'm not sure if it is because the company has been doing SEO for the listing or if the search is not very competitive and Google is just pulling pages from where ever it finds them.

Your thoughts?

Regards,
Dino

[dburk]

Hi Dino,

I get Merchant Circle and Hotfrog listings coming up on the 1st page but only for searches that include the business name, or the keyword + city, and only when competition isn't too great.

I haven't tried promoting these listings since they tend to make it easy to click away to a competitor.

Of all these directories I've tried, it seems that Merchant Circle does the most promotional activity of their own, and my listing pages on their directory have PR2 without me lifting a finger to promote them.