When I initially came across the result pictured above, I didn’t think much of it, Facebook pages often show up in search results. The thing that made me curious was the familiar way with which the title and url structure appeared to be optimized for search. ‘Click’ oh my… Here’s what I found:

The screenshot above reveals a facebook category/town page. This is clearly yellow-pages-centric. 4 business listings organized by geography and buiness type, that’s the yellow page recipe. Clicking on any of these listings brings you to an unclaimed facebook page. Here’s the screenshot when I click on the first one:

It’s like the love child of a Google Place page and a Facebook business info page- Placebook (Interestingly, a whois look-up for placebook.com reveals the owner of the domain as E-bay).

To navigate to your facebook yellow pages, go to your Wall and click on the link to your hometown in the top right. If you can’t find the link, update the hometown field in your facebook settings. After you click the link, you’ll notice the business listings and a box from which you can change the business category.

There are two things that make me think Facebook can be a real contender in Local Search. The first is the sheer awesomeness of the results. The algorithm that will generate the results will be built around your network of Friends (presumably) and will include photos of your friends along with the results, as you saw when you clicked on the link to your hometown. That is the epitome of local/social.

The second thing is content. I recently read that more small business owners have created facebook pages than websites.

It will take a while for Facebook to catch up with Google. They still have to build out the infrastructure of a product that is clearly in its infancy. And they have to get people in the habit of “searching” for things on Facebook.

They could begin by optimizing for Google like everyone else. Which appears to be exactly what they did.

The process that I described in that post was not the link building for their new organic product but rather a pilot program called the “Expert Authors Program.”

The Expert Authors program is free and intended to bring in additional leads at no additional cost to the advertiser. Interestingly, the articles are ghost written by Yodle’s internet marketers and not by the business owner. Interesting because Bryan Phelps of Orange Soda and Nick of Brick Marketing commented on the last post that leaving this up to the customer would be a bad idea. Turns out Yodle agrees.

Yodle was careful to point out that the client I cited was not part of their new organic product and “they would not block robots on a Yodle Organic client’s site nor set up duplicate Web sites for Organic clients.”

One of the questions I was anxious to ask was whether the new organic strategy would be applied to the client’s site or the .net site they often create for sem customers and I was shocked by their answer. They told me that on and off-page optimization would be done to the client’s domain and NOT the .net site. And here is the part that shocked me. I then asked what happens when the client exits the program and they told me the client keeps his or her site.

I’m surprised by this because it removes rather than puts up a blockade to quitting the program. Like cutting the wheel in the direction of a fishtailing rear-end to come out of a slide this seems a counter-intuitive way to reduce churn – actually creating a better product. Who knew they’d come up with that?

What’s brilliant from an “automation expert” point of view is that they turned the job of creating content over to the customer; eliminating the time and cost of producing good content. Here’s an example.

The client’s original site needs to be seen to be believed— here it is. So, I have little doubt that Yodle can help them or that this small business owner knows a single thing about web marketing for that matter. But my problem with this from a customer stand point is that the link building is being done on the site created by Yodle, the .net version of the domain. Which means they are just renting the SEO. Because there is such a long time investment required in an organic campaign this represents the SEO version of holding a gun to the client’s head if they wish to cancel.

Or perhaps Court Cunningham is trying to automate a solution to the churn problem.

What are your thoughts on this type of SEO? Does the customer’s level of sophistication matter here? Is this the future SEO business model?