Misc SEO News
Most Popular Industries According to Yellow Pages
'Inbound' at WebmasterWorld shares what will likely be useful data for some SEM/SEOs:
I just completed some research based on a variety of industry data, here are my rough figures for overall offline YP category use. It should not be a shock to many of you but I thought it might help some people in search of general data. Take your pick on the number of lookups, 15 Billion seems a nice round figure for the year. % - Category
15.6 - Health
14.2 - Food
13.8 - Automobiles
10.2 - Shopping (Consumer)
7.1 - Construction
4.2 - Supplies (Business)
3.6 - Finance & Insurance
[...]
See the YP Category Usage Percentages thread for the entire list.
Via SERoundtable.
Scraper Sites Increase at Astonishing Rate
RandFish at SEOMoz looks into the worrying trend in the high number of scraper pages per genuine ones:
For an example, note this linkdomain search, showing 15,000+ links (you can actually browse to page 99 and see that there really are that many). Since, in the last 6 months, the site (a client of ours) has only gotten referral traffic from about 2,000 URLs, I can assume that at least 7,500 (half), if not many more, are simply scrapers. That's a very, very high percentage of links that are "bad neighborhoods". I have to wonder how effectively this can be combatted...