Looks like Sol Trujillo and the Sensis team have finally realised that their flagship product - everyone’s favourite impromptu monitor-stand - “Yellow“, might not be worth its (singificant) weight in dead trees unless it’s open to search engine indexing.

From B&T Magazine (Australia)

YELLOW.COM.AU OPENS UP
Sensis has opened the door of www.yellow.com.au, to search engines for the
first time. The move enables search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Live
Search to index the 2 million-plus listings on www.yellow.com.au and make
them available to people using search engines to find local businesses.

Now the big search-marketing question will be: what link-juice will a keyword-rich inbound link from Yellow.com.au direct to its customers?

How Yellow Pages manages outbound links

Link text: Domain printed out its entirety only, no description of services at all, just http://www.jcandsonsplumbing.com

Anchor url: Convuluted. The server code Yellow.com.au use to redirect and track outbound links to their customers would probably confuse, or simply annoy, the Googlebot. At least it’s no longer “NOFOLLOW”

PageRank of Yellow.com.au: PR7. This puts it amongst the big hitters, which opens opportunities for them to start up-selling their (I assume) declining customer-base with offers of paid link inclusion. Craftily disguised of course as some kind of editorial business-directory , so as not to attract the wrathful attention of G’s web-spam team.

Overall: I’ll be interested to see how Yellow.com.au upgrade their offering to leverage their PageRank and offer value-added inbound links to customers with websites.

Save your money, create a $200 website and SEO it

The move to open up Yellow’s walled-garden to Google et al might be seen as an acknowledgement that a growing proportion of Australian consumers now turns to the Big White Page rather than the Old Yellow Pages for their commercial search requirements. I often get asked by clients whether they should place an ad in the Yellow Pages, and increasingly I tell them: “Pay some kid with half a clue to make you a one-page website, organise some good inbound links and you’ll get more inbound phonecalls.”

Oh *SNAP* - Google don’t list in Yellow Pages

Search for “Google” in the Yellow Pages. Go on, I’ll wait. … … HAHHHAHA funny, no?

Comment bait - Do you *ever* use the Yellow Pages?

Print version? Or yellow.com.au ? I’m curious who actually uses this service anymore?