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.
Discussion
Previously published comments, retained for reference. New comments are closed.
Mary N.
2011-05-29
I Joined Merchant Circle In April 2010. I received a phone call last week from a potential client who tried to "clip" a coupon offer I had created. She said it was requesting she log in and she just couldn't print it. I didn't understand why so I went to my listing and I tried to clip my own coupon and was also asked to login. This was the first clue that Merchant Circle is B2B and not for the typical consumer that is really my target. I wasted HOURS and HOURS on that site within the past month. I actually feel stupid. So I did a Google search and found this article that confirmed my suspicions. MC is B2B. I will leave my listing up as you suggest, but not spend the time I was spending on it, making connections that lead to nowhere. I really do feel like a fool, not knowing.JD
2011-07-11
Excellent article. Both MerchantCircle and HotFrog offer little value in the way of quality inbound links. The only benefit is having a listing in a place that does get some traffic. It ssems as if most of the traffic on the site comes from those that are obsessed with numbers - as in the number of connections. I advise all my clients to claim their listing and add their content. After that, leave it alone.Alan Cook
2014-03-11
I joined Hotfrog for a while but only got hardly any views to my website. I cancelled my profile when I saw that the free listing prominently advertises my competitors and it is very hard to see my own link. The links to my competitor websites were so large that few people would ever notice I exist. When I clicked on their ad free listing It gave no information about the pricing (apart from the fact I would "pay as I go", which could mean a hundred different things) and I can find no FAQ or an email or contact form to ask them directly. I am very cynical and suspicious when a company tells me how great their services are yet make it impossible to find specific information about the service and pricing without registering all my private details. As I am also not here to promote my competition I cancelled my profile.Andrew Henderson
2016-03-23
March 2016. After painstakingly added my 30 odd massage clinic customers to Hotfrog over the last 4 years they have just deleted them all without notice. When I found what they'd done and enquired, they advised some nonsense that they have to comply with Google's advertising policies. Presumably, to them, all massage is code for a brothel, and they've gone all puritan. Like the article above, Hotfrog's only value was as an inlink - I can't imagine anybody having it as their first choice search directory as it is so ugly and so full of AdWords, and their organic rankings, once impressive, are now non existant. A pox on them for their rudeness.Leo Moran
2020-11-05
Good to know about Hotfrog and MC, Hot frog keeps sending me emails about to do business with them, but now reading this reviews, I won't do it. Thanks a lot for let us know.Matlhakanelo Chitja
2021-06-16
How does hotfrog help with business registered with them like allibana fashionhub, which scaming people, taking their money and not delivering their orders?