Marchex's Direct-Navigation Network: Is it Spam?

[Kevin Newcomb]

Today, Marchex simultaneously launched more than 100,000 local and vertical sites, populated with content garnered from yellow pages, user-generated and expert ratings and reviews, and lots of ads. As I noted on the SEW blog (http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/070627-103036), the content comes from the OpenList technology that Marchex acquired last year.

The network includes videocameras.com, chicagodoctors.com, newyorkdining.com, and hundreds of zip code sites.

So is this a good thing for local search? Or is this dressed-up direct navigation nothing more than search engine spam?

[David Wallace]

Initially it may look like a lot of litter but as one who also owns some local sites (not nearly 100,000), I think I will hold my tongue. ;)

[Nagle]

We take the position that such sites are not legitimate, because Marchex does not, in the sites we've seen, properly identify the name and address of the business operating the web site. Such sites are clearly commercial (they have "commercial intent", as Yahoo uses the term), and thus they should be held to the standards of a business. This is reflected in our ratings of such sites.

We've seen some Marchex sites where there is a link to an "about" page which contains some information about the ownership of the site, but access to the "about" page is prevented by the "robots.txt" file for the site. Their "User-agent: *, Disallow: /-/about/" hides the "about" page from all crawlers. We give those a low rating, since we obey "robots.txt" and thus won't look at the "about" page to find the identity of the business.

Of course, if they did let crawlers see their "about" page, Google would detect duplicate content across multiple sites and reduce their ranking.

John Nagle
SiteTruth