I do indulge myself with the directories

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Christine Hansen: I never look up companies in directories other than what is equivalent to Yellow Pages in my country, do you? These directories have zero value.
  
  
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  El Bikito: Christine Hansen Yeah I don`t. So basically my client did this last month, right before i took over and the site`s traffic grew quite considerably.
  
  So I wanted to explaore the idea in case it had some technical perks.
  
  
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  El Bikito: Christine Hansen But why do you think the site got boosted for the directories?
  
  Do you think it`s a temp boost before the traffic falls back?
  
  
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  Christine Hansen: El Bikito And you are absolutely sure, that it has nothing to do with a Google update or any other circumstance. fx one good quality link among the many your client did...? Were all the backlinks from shady directories? Did your client update/optimize parts of the site? "But why do you think the site got boosted for the directories?" You could check where the traffic came from.
  
  
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  Tim Brownson: Christine Hansen I bow and then bow again to your far superior SEO knowledge, but will say that from a marketing perspective one of the worst things you can do, is base it on what you do/like/would use or respond to.
  
  I spent 4 years working for Yellow Pages and one of the most frustrating experiences was customers turning down really good ads because they didn`t think they`d respond to them. You`re not selling to yourself.
  
  I`m not saying they work btw, I`m saying I`d not use that rationale.
  
  
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  Christine Hansen: Tim Brownson I wouldn`t know how things are in your Yellow Pages. Though I never look at ads in our version, I only mentioned YP, because I do use that registry (our version) from time to time for contact info only. There are so many shady company regs out there, some of them not even staffed or possible to get in contact with. If you think you get a massive boost out of getting a backlink from these, inserting your info, then by all means go ahead. I just have never seen any traffic from them. So it is not what I like, it is what the stats tell me. Just an utter waste of time.
  
  
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  Christine Hansen: Also, John Mueller stated this: "...you could go off and create millions of links across millions of websites if you wanted to, and we could just ignore them all.Or there could be one really good link from one website out there that is, for us, a really important sign that we should treat this website as something that is relevant because it has that one link… So the total number essentially is completely irrelevant."
  
  
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  El Bikito: Christine Hansen Yes of course. I know the value of quality. It will always trump quantity.
  
  
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  Roger Montti: Please forget that brand mentions bullshit too because it`s bullshit.
  
  Read this article, it goes BEYOND what Mueller says because I explain where the brand mentions bullshit originated from and how it happened.
  
  https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-seo.../430848/
  
  SEARCHENGINEJOURNAL.COMGoogle`s John Mueller on Brand MentionsGoogle`s John Mueller on Brand Mentions
  
  
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  Christine Hansen: To call mentions bullshit is a little over the top. Yes, I have seen Muellers talk about mentions and what they are not. Mentions work the same way as meta descriptions - they have no ranking - but they do work wonders in the attraction of customers. I`ve noticed spikes on sites after journalists have mentioned companies in their article pieces. A lot of newspapers just don`t do links, so the next best thing is a mention. Mentions, like any other words, are trackable. Not all marketing is linkable.
  
  
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  Jenni Brown: Christine Hansen I can`t see that being the case. In the real world, me mentioning the name of a political party is very different from me voting for a political party. Many sites deliberately choose not to link to certain sites because they don`t want to give them credence but still need to name them for the content to make sense. Deliberately withholding a link shouldn`t be seen as a positive, especially as Google is keen for sites to link naturally.
  
  
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  Christine Hansen: Jenni Brown Ehm, I am not sure what you are referring to when you write; "I can`t see that being the case". I have never said that I think it is a positive, that newspapers don`t do links.
  
  
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  Jenni Brown: Christine Hansen I can`t see it being the case that Google regards mentions that highly is what I meant. Potentially for one or two of the bigger newspapers, not for other sites, but even then it`s dubious.
  
  
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  Christine Hansen: Jenni Brown As I wrote, they have no ranking. Let`s look at what happens to a mention: Someone actually reads the newspaper, perhaps even in paper form. See the name drop. Search on Google for that name. See the result and click. Google picks up on the…
  
  
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  Christine Hansen: If mentions are no good, then old school marketing is no good, eg tv, radio, magazines etc. are no good.
  
  
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  Jenni Brown: Christine Hansen I don`t think it would be as simple as improving rankings like that unless it was an absolutely massive scale and consistently happened for that specific search result (which would likely be a brand name search anyway)
  
  
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  Jenni Brown: Christine Hansen Regarding rankings improvements I mean
  
  
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  Christine Hansen: Jenni Brown I talked about a spike - which is what I have experienced with mentions.
  
  
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  Jenni Brown: Christine Hansen That would be PR attribution rather than SEO
  
  
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  Christine Hansen: Jenni Brown Exactemont!
  
  
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  Roger Montti: Read the article, Jenni Brown I think you will see how much we actually agree. My article is not just opinion, it`s backed up with a citation to a Google patent.
  
  The mentions as ranking factor is bullshit, the article tells where that idea gained traction and shows how the patent was misinterpreted.
  
  
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  Christine Hansen: Roger Montti Never have I ever disagreed with what Mueller said about this phonomenon. I guess it is easy to misunderstand.
  
  
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  Josh Levenson: If it looks spammy to you as a human, it will look mathematically spammy to Google`s algos.
  
  
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  Michael Martinez: Google does not adjust rankings based on CTR. Click-through rates change constantly and they have many contexts. They are an unreliable signal for determining quality, relevance, or rankings.
  
  Brand mentions DO generate search activity. I`ve seen it happen many times with my own sites, after I`ve been interviewed or at least mentioned by the news media. None of my rankings for any queries changed as a result of earning hundreds or thousands of clicks in the search results for one-off brand mentions.
  
  I agree with Roger that someone in the SEO industry cooked up the "brand mentions as a ranking signal" theory without any real context from Google. Eric Schmidt was famously quoted as saying he felt "brands" were the answer to the cesspool the Web had become (he was referring to all the cheap content marketers were flooding the SERPs with).
  
  I think people latched on to the brand concept and morphed it into a (supposed) signal.
  
  Now, what Google does do is extrapolate entity references from Web content and try to determine if they are useful in some way. But the discrete examples I`ve seen them share boil down to things like inferring relationships between names - "Paris is a city in France", "the capital of France is Paris" being one of their most often-cited examples. They "learn" which entities are important in certain frequently used contexts and then might do stuff with that knowledge (such as populating Knowledge Boxes or Carousels).
  
  So, there is an indirect relationship between high-volume brand mentions and entity relationship extrapolation. That does sometimes lead to things being injected into SERP annotations, but Google also tries to verify these inferred relationships through alternative sources. As a published author, I can get Google to generate Knowledge Boxes about me and (some of) my books even though I don`t have a Wikipedia article (which many people wrongly assume you need to get those kinds of annotations). Google finds my books` names (and sometimes other information) on many ecommerce sites, some book review sites, and my own sites. So they can piece together the puzzle to generate fairly accurate Knowledge Boxes even without a formal database reference.
  
  That`s about as far as I`ll go in arguing that "brand mentions" might mean something to Google`s algorithms in some abstract way.