Lately, we’ve met a lot of people who are annoyed with Yellow Pages. Most recently, we met a business owner who wanted out of having a Yellow Pages website when he discovered his Google Adwords account only generated links through their Yellow Pages hyperlink. When he went to YP to release the domains, they wouldn’t – they don’t allow their sites to be moved. They said they were unable to release his domains to him until the contract was finished.
This is not the first time we’ve heard of businesses being less than happy with Yellow Pages. Here are some more reasons why we say Yellow Pages websites are a terrible idea for any business looking to host one.
Reason 1: Your Domain is Held Hostage
This is to reiterate our previous example of the unfortunate customer experience with Yellow Pages. Whenever you set up a domain name for your website with YP, it is under their control from now on – not yours. This means if you want to move away from their services and regain your website’s domain, expect to undergo a long, stressful endeavor with YP to get back that control – and at an expensive cost.
This is why it’s so important that before you go asking Yellow Pages for help with your website domain to contact us. We will set up your website, however the domain name are yours and yours alone.
Reason 2: Uninspired Design Templates
Unlike WordPress, which not only comes with premium templates that cater to your design preferences but also with free templates, Yellow Pages offers only the most basic, cookie-cutter design templates for websites you can think of. Again, that’s something they control once the design is set up, so good luck trying to re-design if something about your business is out of date.
Reason 3: Their Tactics to Get You on Their Side are Shady
If you’ve ever encountered one or more of these excuses from a representative at YP, know now that these are completely false:
- “Your rank will improve on Google if you have a Yellow Pages listing.”
- “We’re the only authorized Google Adwords reseller in Canada.”
- “Our websites get more traffic than Google.”
- “We have special ways of making your website show up on Google.”
- “If you cancel with us, your ranking on Google will go down.”
If you’re not sure how to reply to any of these, here’s a more specific resource that explains why these tactics of theirs are horrible in general.
Reason 4: Poor to Zero Search Engine Optimization
We’ve recently discovered that, shockingly, Yellow Pages has no experience in creating properly optimized web pages and content. This means if you sign up with YP for a website, say goodbye to featuring any meaningful, good quality content that actually boosts your ranking on Google rather than stay stagnant. In comparison to Google and their continuous updates to good SEO guidelines, YP remains about ten, maybe twenty years in the past as far as optimization is concerned.
Reason 5: You Don’t Own Your Website. Period.
Anytime you build a website with YP it belongs to them – not you. This means you can’t easily switch to new hosting if your website is a YP one. YP also copyrights the pages to themselves, not to you, so even if you wanted to move your website, you’d be running headfirst into several copyright legality issues if you try to duplicate the website on another hosting platform.
Bottom line, if you’re thinking about coming to Yellow Pages for a new website…don’t. Just don’t. Come to us at V3 Media. The website we can develop for you is yours and yours alone.