How listing quality is scored, and why paid placement never moves it

Every list of businesses on this site is ordered by a quality score, then by rating, then alphabetically. The score is not a secret and there is no reason for it to be one.

What is in it

Points are awarded for the profile containing things a person searching actually needs:

• A description long enough to say what the business does
• A street address, where the business has a shopfront
• A phone number
• A website
• Opening hours, with more weight when the full week is published
• Three or more specific things the business offers
• Feature attributes, the beer garden and pet friendly and emergency call out flags
• A link to the business's Google profile
• A social account
• Details read from the business's own site rather than a third party listing
• A licence number on record

The maximum is 100. A listing below 40 is set to noindex, follow, which means it stays on the site, keeps its links, and does not go into a search index until it is worth being there.

What is not in it

Money. There is no field on a listing that a payment writes to, and there is no branch in the ordering code that reads a payment status. That is a design decision, not a policy statement, and it is checkable: the ranking function is about ten lines long and it takes two arguments, neither of which is a plan.

Promoted placement will exist eventually. When it does it will be boxed, labelled as promoted, and excluded from the structured data that describes the results list, so a search engine reading the page is not told a paid slot is an organic result. The advertising policy sets that out.

Why completeness and not popularity

Because popularity in a regional town is mostly a function of how long a business has existed, and a directory that ranks on it is a directory that never surfaces anyone new. A five year old business with a filled in profile is more useful to somebody searching at 9pm with a burst pipe than a thirty year old one with a phone number and nothing else.

It also happens to be the only signal we can measure honestly. We do not know who is good. We do know who has published their hours.

How to move up

Claim the listing and fill it in. It is free, it takes about ten minutes, and the score recomputes on the next build. There is no faster path and there is no paid path.

The claim page explains the process.