iBegin Blog

Better late than never!

As promised earlier, the newest version of iBegin Share is out. Beyond the little bug fixes are three new skins, and a simpler little image + text option.

We’ve just released a new version of iBegin Share. It comes with:

1. A few bug updates
2. Supports the Open Share Icon
3. Now includes click stats!

Please note that the stat-tracking is localized - we do not track any of your sites.

In the next few days we will be releasing different color versions:

I recently read a post by David Mihm on The Ten Commandments of Online Marketing for Small & Local Business (whew how is that for a targeted link text!), and was not surprised to not find iBegin.com listed.

I sent a quick email to David outlining why adding to iBegin.com is a good idea:

1. Submission is free. Submission is easy.
2. We have over 75 paying customers using our data. So if you submit to us, not only are you listed with ‘us’, you could appear on another 75 sites
3. When we list your business on www.iBegin.com, and you have a URL - our link is not nofollowed. I find local sites that nofollow links to the business owner’s website despicable.
4. The search engines love our site! Some Google and Yahoo stats:
   • Google has 4.8 million pages indexed for iBegin. Google trusts us (and we have earned it!)
   • Google reports 80,000 backlinks to iBegin.com (this from Google Webmaster Tools)
   • Yahoo has 3.25 million pages indexed for iBegin. Just like Google, Yahoo trusts us
   • Yahoo reports almost 190,000 backlinks to iBegin.com

   We have worked hard to build a reputable site.

5. iBegin.com itself gets over 600,000+ unique visitors a month. And we are not targeted as a destination site.

By submitting your busines to iBegin.com you get both exposure and SEO value out of it. Could be why we are getting more and more submissions every day.

With the recent news being splashed around about spam appearing in ‘open’ systems like Yahoo and Google, some have taken a very harsh approach on UGC.

At iBegin we were soliciting ‘reviewed’ submissions (like Yahoo) over two years, and then instantaneous-updates (ala Google) over a year ago (over at iBegin Source), and over that time we’ve become quite aware of a dozen different kinds of spam. While I don’t want to throw open the entire book, some interesting things that should be in the conversation:

Track it All (User Behavior)
This goes without saying, but all updates submissions are tracked. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out when a single IP comes out of nowhere, submits a business, edits three businesses in a related category, and then doesn’t come back. It does require some processing power to do this, but the problem is smaller than you think (by focusing on recent modifications, and not all listings).

Still this covers most of it. I was shocked when I read that Google Maps only allowed 5 edits. Literally - I was shocked! The world’s most powerful search/data processing company cannot deal with more than 5 edits at a time? User behavior includes building a user trustrank - how reliable have they been in the past? One good user may do 100 legitimate updates, whereas 5 bad users may do a total of 10 bad updates. Is it worth pissing off the good even though he produces 10x? Even more of an issue when you consider that all edits can be reverted with a click of a button.

Still, the truth is that …

Most Spammers are Quite Stupid
And by spammers I mean anyone trying to ruin the intent of the local site (modifying competitors, submitting faux reviews, etc). When we still actively ran out city site like iBegin Toronto, the amount of spam being ‘obvious’ was stunning. Of course the my favorite involved user ‘companyx’ who would submit ‘Company X’, review it saying how it was the best, all while using ‘xxx@companyx.com’ This happens a lot more than you think!

Users want to do Good
Looking back at our numbers, far less than 1% of updates/submissions are incorrect. Less than half of those that are incorrect are with an ‘evil’ intent. Most are accidents - typos, didn’t realize they had moved, etc. Empowering the user is a damn good thing

You Need to Verify
Yahoo has a ‘review submission’, yet somehow let in over a thousand affiliate links. Google doesn’t seem to be verifying (or is overwhelmed) - I submitted a slight typo update to the local Marriott (eg changed the URL to mariot.com, which redirects fine), and it hasn’t been caught in 3+ business days. It is unfortunate, it is a pain in the ass … but you have to verify. Most verifications can easily be done via eye-balling - eg adding a website, you just click on it and can quickly see via WHOIS/info on the page if it matches.

Addresses Match
Part of getting to that verification process is to flag entries that are questionable. So if someone submits an address that matches 3+ businesses or is the address of an established mailbox source, you flag it. There are many other combinations of data analysis that can help aid you in flagging questionable records.

Businesses where their legal name is stuffed with keywords
We ran into this about a year ago. Some company had legally changed its name to have over 10 keywords stuffed in their name. Eg if I was a fishing company, it was something like ‘Bass Fishing Bait Reeling Fly Ice’ etc etc. They had successfully submitted to companies like YellowPages.com and SuperPages.com, and were asking why we kept shortening their name.

The conundrum is obvious - the intent behind their legal name is obvious, but is it any good for our users (and customers?) There is a lot of talk about optimizing for search engines (including this hilarious riff on ‘If Google had to optimize for Google’), but no one yet has mentioned the use of keyword stuffing in the naming of a legitimate company.

While the above deals with 99% of the issues, there are still borderline issues to deal with. Eg Pay Day - what is to stop me from registering ‘Pay Day Loans of Toronto’ as an incorporated company, and then selling lead gens just through my website? Even though I am nothing more than a glorified affiliate site, I can claim I am just like the hundreds of mortgage brokers found throughout North America. I am sure they get listed - why wouldn’t I?

Going on my above ‘Addresses Match’, what about businesses that are sole proprietorships and work from home? I wouldn’t want to give out my home address, which means I need to use a mailbox. Does that preclude me from local listings? Most local search has a distance factor built into it - so where do I get established? My mailbox? City center? Nowhere?! Not an easy answer.

Hopefully my post has helped think about the context of spam in local search, and I would love to hear ideas on both fighting spam, and also borderline issues (I love gray-area issues - source of many interesting conversations).

A few things:

1: We named from iBegin Gamma to iBegin Labs. The self-explanatory name makes things easier in explaining.

2: We have new versions of iBox v2 and iBegin Share (and their associated WP plugins).

3: We have a website now live under Labs - iBegin Places. It is an experiment in user-generated informal space. Will it work or won’t it? We cannot answer that. And we won’t be for at least a while. We hope with the right tools (and easy export tools) people will give it a go. To show what it can do, we even uploaded the Zillow neighborhood data (download the original data here).

We’ve released new updates to iBox v2 and iBegin Share. We’ve also released corresponding WP plugins - making it easy to iBox and share your blog posts.

Some people have privately asked me why even have Gamma? Why have these tools? We built these tools for ourselves. We used iBox for the login form, registration, pictures, etc. We built iBegin Share so that we can place it over on www.iBegin.com and people can use it. These are tools and websites and thoughts we built and wrote for ourselves. But we also want to help move the local space forward, so instead of everyone creating their own version again (or having to pay a commercial provider), we are releasing it the public. Let them use it as they wish.

We should have our first Gamma Project website up tonight!

We like trying new stuff. We end up creating a lot a stuff. Stuff that never gets to see the light of day and just sits around.

Until now.

Hoping to help push the entire local space, we have now launched iBegin Gamma (a slight play on the perpetual betas sites go through). A collection of random tools, websites, and thoughts, we hope to help move online local forward.

To start:

iBox v2 - cleaned up, and now with extended support via plugins. We’ve built-in the first plugin - YouTube support!

iBegin Share - easy script for sharing + spreading your website. WP plugin almost complete.

So try it out, and let us know what you think. And more coming soon of course.

Update: 2.1.0 of iBox is out - some little bug fixes, and introduces skin support.

We’ve updated the free Zip codes, US cities, and Canadian cities downloads from our iBegin Geocoder.

With the moratorium in place, we have unleashed a new homepage for iBegin.com.

This also fixes the search for both US/Canada. Finally!

Just back from ILM:07 - we had a great time, and met some extremely interesting people (far more than us).

One thing that some people were/are uncomfortable with are our city sites. Though we have always (and will continue to do so) that our sites have the exact same data we sell, and it is what you do with the data that is most important, we still recognize that some can be uncomfortable.

So we have placed a moratorium on city sites for a minimum of 12 months. They have been effectively removed from the front page of iBegin.com as of today.