Publisher API

If you are an agency, SEO specialist, or a local search listing optimizer, it can be laborious and costly to add listings manually to Brownbook. We have a Publisher API that can help you reduce the time, cost, error rate and administrative overhead of adding and maintaining thousands of listings on Brownbook.net – The Global Business Listing Database.

Using our Publisher API you can search, insert, edit, and delete listings in volume. There are 5 simple steps:

1. Review the API documentation here: https://docs.brownbook.net
2. Download and sign the API Agreement (agreeing to pay US $0.10 per listing per month) here: brownbook-data-publication-agreement
3. Scan and email the signed API Agreement to: admin@brownbook.net for the attention of Marc or David
4. We will give you an Oauth key / token
5. You code to the live API

AWS Migration Update 2

Update: We rehearsed the full migration this week, and hit a few minor issues, thankfully nothing scary, so work continues to get this fully done. Our plan now incorporates some staged migration of different elements of the system over the next week or so, and we’ll let you know here how it gets on. Thats all for now 🙂

AWS Migration Update

A quick update on the migration: We’re shooting for a full move to AWS on May 3rd.  If you’re a partner Publisher using our Local Listing Publisher API we’ll reach out to you direct to update you on the plan and progress.

A major update and refresh, on its way

I’ve just been reviewing the new designs for the Brownbook website, and I’m getting excited. But let me put aside the excitement for a moment, and explain some of the rationale for the changes that are coming.

Way back, when we started Brownbook, we had a simple goal: to bring the concept of crowd-sourced production to a stale industry – that occupied by folks like Yellow Pages, SuperPages, Yell, and others.  Our view was, 7 years ago, that we could create a crowd-sourced local business directory, and, we did it – with bells on.

But, in fact, we did much more than that!

Brownbook now stands at more than 35 million business listings worldwide, it has more than 1.1 million registered users, some 30,000 of whom use the site to actually add and update listings every single month.  Of that 35 million listings, more than 2 million are organically added and updated (that’s about as big as the UK yellow pages, but created by the crowd and fractional cost and with infinitely more efficiency).

What Brownbook has become is the worlds largest Global Business Listing Database, and its still growing fast.

So, time for a refresh and rethink: In the next few weeks we’ll be migrating the platform from its current hosting provider to AWS (Amazon Web Services) to greatly improve performance. That’s performance of the web user interface (which presently is diabolical) but, perhaps more importantly, performance of the Publisher API.  We’ll also be updating the UI to be cleaner, simpler, and generally a bit more elegant – that 7-year old design is certainly showing its age.

We’ve also found some important changes in the way that businesses, and particularly their agencies, use Brownbook.  Small businesses can still add their business listings, claim and verify them, and enrich them with additional text, images, videos, and social links through the website. And that helps them get found on the top search engines through Brownbook’s great SEO. But increasingly we’ve had requests from SEO companies, and local search optimization, listings, and location management agencies to provide an API for adding listings in volume.  In response to that we’ve been road-testing the Brownbook Publisher API for a few months, and its just about to hit prime time.  The Publisher API lets large businesses, publishers, SEOs, agencies, and local search teams add and manage listing in Brownbook with ease, no manual keying and no human error. Its fast, easy to use, and you can be integrated and live within a matter of days – more on this later.

So, watch out for a new look, faster platform, and public API coming soon. If your a publisher and interested in the Publisher API, drop us a line via the Contact Us page on the Brownbook.net site. Or just click here.

Welcome back

Well, its been a long time, and welcome back! Please excuse the deafening silence for the last, oh, 5 years! Can it really be that long??

Well, the good news is that The Brownbook has been performing almost flawlessly for 5 years without much attention on our part. That’s down to the original fully-automated and self-service design that we created. Its like a factory with an automated production line, every now and again we drop in the ensure the lights are on and the machine has fuel, and actually thats all its needed to keep running.

But, its time for us to step back in and give it a little love.  

More

Richer Business Profile Pages get more traffic and clicks [stats]

We did a little analysis this week, intended for some internal purposes but the results are so interesting that I thought I’d share them with you.

Business Pages with more content get more views and clicks – sounds obvious and we’ve been saying that for some time, but how about some real hard numbers to back that up.

It’s long been accepted that more rich content = better SEO (all other things being equal), and that’s good news for small businesses and local businesses trying to get found online.  But how much of a difference does more content make?

Well here you go, here is the actual answer within the Brownbook world (based on 30 days activity and a sample of 900 business listings that saw activity in that period):

The numbers:

views-and-links-table
Visual:

views-and-clicks-analysis-graph
What does %complete mean?
This is a measure by which we deem a Business Profile Page to be completed, and you can see how it gets to 100% in this snippet (You’ll find this near the top right of your Business Profile Page, you’ll need to be signed in when looking at your claimed business page to see this):

views-and-clicks-analysis-how
A few quick conclusions:

  • Getting your Business Profile Page more complete results in more views and clicks
  • The difference in views between 30% and 90% is about 10x (and 2x when you go from 80% to 90%)
  • We’re getting an astonishing click through ratio of close to 20% in most cases and often higher
  • There seems to be an odd result where businesses at 90% get on average more clicks than those on 100% (I wonder why that is, perhaps because more info presented removes some of the need for the viewer to click through to the business’s website?)
  • (I noticed another anomaly in clicks at 50% complete – I  will see if more analysis can reveal what’s happening here)

The FOUR simple tricks to NOT screw up your shiny new SEO

Brownbook business listings give you great organic SEO, helping your business get found more on search engines. But DID YOU KNOW you can mess that up with a few well-meaning faux-pas?

Here are FOUR simple tricks you can use to easily avoid the common mistakes and get higher up those search rankings…

1. DON’T do ‘keyword stuffing’

This old-school SEO tactic used to use mass repetition of the same keywords throughout a web page to rank that page highly for those keywords. But search engines quickly got wise, and keyword stuffing now results in penalization and LOWER RANKING. Instead use the business and location tags to populate a variety of keywords and phrases and AVOID mass repetition. Is your listing sub-optimal for this reason? If so correct it now for higher search rankings.

2. DON’T make duplicate or near-duplicate listings

Get more listings for the same business and you’ll get more traffic, right? WRONG.

In fact Google and other search engines are extremely good at recognizing near duplicate content, and will de-rank ALL pages txhat appear to be duplicates. Result: Poor ranking and a waste of your time trying. BETTER to create and curate one really good listing and enrich it with unique and informative content.

Have you created a duplicate listing problem for yourself in Brownbook? Remedy that killing the duplicates, and picking one listing to enrich and boost.

3. DON’T make incorrect use of the address, contacts and tag fields

Something else I see from time to time is the use of Brownbook’s address and contact fields for non-address info, for example, including pricing, phone numbers, or text designed to entice a user. It sounds like a great idea, but did you know we use Microformats (what are Microformats?) to help search engines understand what the data on our pages means. We tell Google to expect an address, zip code, country, phone number etc in certain places, and if you’ve filled those fields with off-format text and messaging you’ll be getting marginal or possibly negative benefits from them. Google tries to identify spam pages to remove them from it’s index. Is your page looking spammy? If it is save yourself some time AND get better results by sticking to the rules.

4. DON’T let it stagnate

Did you know that new and updated listings in Brownbook are indexed by Google in as little as 20 minutes? No? Well now you do. How can you make this work for you? Well, you don’t want to create multiple listings (see note 2 above) but you can keep Google interested by updating your listing frequently. We recommend you set a diary reminder at least once a week to make updates on your Brownbook Business Page: add a special offer, update your product or brand list, get a new review, there’s loads you can do. Recently updated businesses sit right on our home page and are never more than one link away from it for the search engine spiders.

To update your listings login to your Brownbook account by clicking here and click on any of your claimed listings to edit or update them.

Stick to these simple rules and you’ll reap the benefits with better SEO and more visitors.
That’s all for now, more hints and tips next time. Until then, all the best,

Dave & Marc

Brownbook.net
Helps you get found online
http://www.brownbook.net

PS: You can follow us on Twitter here:
http://twitter.com/daveingram
http://twitter.com/marc_lyne