Marchex Simultaneously Launches 100K Local Search Sites

Jun 27, 2007 at 8:41am ET by Greg Sterling

If you can believe it, Marchex has simultaneously launched more than 100,000 local and vertical search sites representing over a billion pages. The move is probably unprecedented outside of a search index. In May 2006, Marchex acquired local search site OpenList and has used its technology assets and methodology to enable this launch. Before this acquisition, its domain portfolio business was essentially a collection of links to advertisers.

Now sites like Cuisine.com or BayAreaHotels.com or 10013.com, among scores of others, are real sites with navigation, search, user-generated content and refinement filters.

These sites still contain ads but they’re mostly content sites in which people can rate businesses and perform the kinds of local searches they would do on a yellow pages site or local search engine. See, for example, this result for “Sushi, New York” from Cuisine.com.

Mapping and the ads themselves come from Yahoo.

Through this relaunch what the company has effectively done is built a massive local ad network. And it will eventually knit all these sites together through links back to OpenList, which will itself relaunch in the fall. The company says it has 31 million uniques, in the aggregate, across these sites.

Most companies launch the destination and then think about SEO. Marchex is effectively leading with a massive SEO strategy with the consumer destination to follow.

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land, and writes a personal blog Screenwerk, examining the broader world of media and advertising. He also posts at a Local Mobile Search, which is focused on the mobile Internet.

See more articles by Greg Sterling >

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exposureTim, June 27th, 2007 at 11:24 am ET:

I have to say it: This is bad news for the Internet.

It’s pollution – 100,000 times over.

And Marchex is squatting on so many domains that legitimate businesses or individuals could make far better use of.

Xuru, June 27th, 2007 at 11:55 am ET:

Wow, those are some ugly urls. They might have a hard time getting much of that content indexed looking that bad.

And people wonder why Google has gone so far to the authority route. It’s because they don’t want new sites like this ranking.

Marchex Simultaneously Launches 100K Local Search Sites

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