Don’t obsess over MerchantCircle or HotFrog

I have seen many small business owner find themselves obsessed with MerchantCircle and HotFrog – two of the lowest value internet yellow pages in my opinion. Both websites bill themselves as premium advertising opportunities and users of both claim their preferred of the two is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

Search engines at this time do not seem to take either very seriously. You won’t get a citation from either in Google Places, their backlinks are viewed as low value, and reviews from both won’t make their way into Google Places. There is no review or approval process at either bsite – anyone can create a listing for a fictitious business and no alarm will sound.

MerchantCircle:

MC does have value if your products and services are marketed to other businesses. If you own a B2B company, for example Placement Edge, than you can and will generate some leads from MerchantCircle. If you are a plumber or home contractor, you are wasting your time. You need a product that is easy to sell and that every business owner needs if you want to market yourself on MC. You need a product that you can sell just as easily to someone in Alaska as you can your own city. We have generated leads from this site, and honestly MC is a perfect place to market a company like ours.

• Citation in Google Places*: NO
• Reviews appear in Google Places*: NO
• Data appearing in Google Places*: NONE

HotFrog:

HotFrog appears to be a great site to be listed on. If you write about 5 of your products or services, you can appear at the top of a high pagerank category linked from the homepage. I’ve looked around, and none of that juice appears to be passed to the listings. When you are dealing with sites the size of Hot Frog and MC, you can be assured Google has carefully analyzed them and adjusted their algorithm for listings. They do not review listings, there appears to be no quality control. HotFrog is basically a link farm/article depository.

• Citation in Google Places*: NO
• Reviews appear in Google Places*: NO
• Data appearing in Google Places*: NONE

So you really dislike these sites?

Not necessarily. I dislike the fact that many business owners waste time on them believing they will generate leads, or benefit their local SEO efforts greatly. There is some value here:

• Both sites can be used as part of a reputation management campaign
• MerchantCircle is great for B2B businesses, if you have the energy to invest
• HotFrog can be used for posting articles, which are quickly indexed and often rank well
• I have seen MC listings rank organically for competitive localized searches where the listing owner had not set up a website

Don’t ignore either of these sites

You should create a listing at both sites! But do not obsess over either site.