Yell.com Backlink Competition in the UK

[birdman87]

Hello

Amongst other things, IM has taken me in the direction of doing SEO and site design work for local businesses in the UK.

In general, local businesses are super easy to rank highly for.

I am noticing, however, that a lot of businesses are sometimes getting ranked highly and even have a page rank of between 2 and 3. So often I'm noticing that all of their backlinks or at least the majority of their backlinks are coming from Yell.com.

This site obviously holds a lot of authority because some of their listing backlinks are PR 2 or 3 themselves! I've seen sites with over 100 backlinks from Yell. All the different listings are basically the same but have a different postcode or keyword attached to them.

I would like to be able to predict to clients how long they will be looking at waiting for a top of Google position. Does anybody have any experience at beating these links? How much power should i attribute to them? I'm thinking just a bit of targeted and high PR backlinking with correct anchor text should do the trick but I'm not entirely sure. Want to be able to have a clear idea of what to expect and pass that on to my clients.

Anybody that does local search in the UK free to comment on this?

Cheers