Daniel Schulman

In a recent highly-digged rant Sugarrae, an SEO consulatant, went off on MerchantCircle. While some of what she said was accurate, her venom certainly made for all of it being fun reading. One thing that caught my eye was her characterization of MerchantCircle as “the mafia of business listings on the web.”

Hey, people are saying bad things about you, and we’re letting them. And we’re making sure they get publicity. If you want protection, it will cost you a fee each month

Her point was that MerchanCircle was strong-arming merchants into signing up to remove bad reviews. Since MerchantCircle only allows users to remove reviews posted directly on their service (not for example ones from Yahoo Local that they scrape) and there are no MerchantCircle reviews until someone does do a free sign-up, her mafioso statements were more clever than true.

However, I believe I have discovered the real mafia of business listings on the web and they go by the name of CitySearch. Apparently under some new scheme paying merchants have tools to respond to poor reviews whereas merchants who never chose to be listed do not.

Wait! you say, “that’s hardly threatening to burn down your store.”

True enough, it is a very weak form of protection. But there’s more … I’ve been speaking with an Account Manager who cold-called me for one of my clients. When he asked me to pay money to promote my client’s listing, I replied, “why would I want to do that when there is a bad review on it.” I went on to explain that we have been working for several months to get the review removed as it clearly violates CitySearch’s guidelines. He told me, he would see about getting it remove for me.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, I again receive a phone call from the Account Manager. He told me he was unsuccessful in getting the review removed. However, if I were to become a paying customer, they would remove it. When I uproariously complained about their mafia-tactics (ok, it was actually pretty timid — I’m no Sugarrae), he patiently explained how busy they were in reviewing reviews and naturally paying customers get a higher priority.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 2:53 pm and is filed under local search. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.