SuperPages Cleans Up Its Act

May 7, 2007 at 1:13pm ET by Greg Sterling

SuperPages cleans up its act? What I mean by that is the new site design is a great deal cleaner and easier to navigate than the old site.

Some awkward elements remain, such as old style “disambiguation” pages. But the new results pages are more user friendly and less cluttered.

There are also more refinement capabilities and a new emphasis on dynamic maps. SuperPages has also beefed up personalization features and location-specific recommendations based on registration information.

Here’s the release, which details the new enhancements.

The new design comes amid a host of changes and upgrades at SuperPages, including new sponsored search rankings based in part on click-through rates.

Interestingly, Microsoft has emerged as the mapping vendor of choice for the large yellow pages sites. SuperPages uses Virtual Earth, as does YellowPages.com.

About The Author: Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog Screenwerk, about SoLoMo issues and connecting the dots between online and offline. He also posts at Internet2Go, which is focused on the mobile Internet. Follow him @gsterling. See more articles by Greg Sterling

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http://travel.blizzardemail.com Carrie Hill

So I just clicked some links in the new interface for “Hotels” (link from their homepage) then “Denver Hotels” and the top 15 results were not geo-targeted – chain homepages and the top 3 results were in Aspen, about 4 hrs from Denver. Looks like now that they have the look they need to work on the “relevance”

It will be interesting to watch.

Thanks for the heads-up
~Carrie
http://www.weboptimist.com WebOptimist

SuperPages has some other cleaning up to do as far as I am concerned. I had set up an account with them for a client who decided he wanted to drop all PPC advertising due to a health situation. I tried numerous times to cancel the account and continued to get call after call from clueless SuperPages reps trying to get the account up and running.

To make a long story short, even after enduring through their red tape B.S. of going through a rep who had to get a manager on the line, etc., etc., the account has still not been closed as requested.

My client has recovered from his cancer surgery and has decided to do PPC again, but I’ve kept the SuperPages account to a bare minimum just because we could never get them to close the darned thing.

If you are considering advertising with SuperPages, be aware that you are likely to be deluged with calls from SuperPages reps.

Give me AdWords or Yahoo PPC any day.
http://www.wtfis.com Humor Blog

WebOptimist is correct. In worked for a company that advertised with them once and they wouldn’t leave us alone. Then we had 3rd party people trying to resell us SuperPages ads as their own service. It was double bombardment. But regardless of the calls, the service did not lead to additional sales. That’s why we pulled it.

Things can change though. I suppose.
http://www.topranksearch.com/ David

I agree with the post above – to cancel an account is like impossible. I had to wait for my cc to run out of date before I got a reply….

Never again.
http://www.sierrawebmarketers.blogspot.com MikeM

Interesting reading others accounts of SuperPages follies. One client who we removed from SuperPages PPC 4 months ago is still showing top sponsored spot on MSN live.localsearch. The reps were persistant but polite, not tricky like the Yellowpages.com reps.
Concerning relevancy I agree most local results are filled with national advertisers. Who needs all that junk at the top when you are looking for simple local services. Try plumber, Bozeman MT, the first local result is below the fold.
As for the redesign it reminds me now of Local.com, a site I use more often lately.