If you run something small and you read enough advice, you will eventually hit the feeling that everyone else is doing something more aggressive than you are, and that your reluctance is costing you.
This post is about where the boundary sits, and what happens on our side of it. It is a boundary statement rather than a lecture. Some of what is on the other side is genuinely grey, some of it is simply ineffective, and none of it makes the person doing it a bad operator.
We should also be clear about what this post does not do. It makes no claims about how search engines behave, what they permit or how they respond, and it does not quote or paraphrase anyone's published guidelines as though they had the force of a rule. That is not this site's subject and speculating about it would be worse than staying quiet. What we can speak to is our own entry bar, which is published, versioned and consequential.
What this is, and who it is for
This is for the operator asking whether they are supposed to be doing the aggressive stuff too. The answer here is a line, drawn once, with the consequences attached, so you can decide for yourself rather than by vibe.
It is also for anybody who wants to hold us to something. A site that publishes an entry bar should be willing to say, in advance, what falls outside it.
The line, stated once
Findability is making it easier for a person who would want you to recognise that they want you. Everything else is making it easier for a machine to encounter you.
That is the whole distinction. Work on the first side improves what a real reader experiences: a clearer first sentence, a working contact route, a stated availability, an honest price signal, an about page with something checkable in it. The honest version of the work is entirely made of that.
Work on the second side improves what an automated system encounters and does nothing for the reader, and sometimes actively wastes their time. That is the test to apply when you are unsure: does this help the person, or only the counter?
The line is not a moral hierarchy. It is a description of who the work is for.
Not findability: pages that exist only to be found
The pattern is a set of near-identical pages generated to cover every combination of something you do and somewhere you might do it, or every variation of a phrase, with nothing genuinely different behind them. The reader who lands on one finds a page assembled from a template, learns nothing specific, and has to work out where the actual business is.
There is a name for this and it is defined properly in the doorway page, defined, along with the other terms in this category that get used interchangeably.
The reason we can be firm about this is that it is a rule we apply to ourselves first. This site publishes no page keyed to a place-and-category combination, and never will. That constraint is written into our own publishing rules, not just recommended to other people, and giving it up would be the first sign that something here had gone wrong.
What the honest version looks like: one page per thing you actually do, and one page about where you actually work, written once and well. If you serve six towns, one sentence naming six towns serves a reader better than six pages that say the same thing with a word swapped.
Not findability: bulk submission to hundreds of listing sites
We are a directory and we will still say this plainly. Submitting yourself to every listing site you can find is a poor use of a limited afternoon, and the reasons hold even if you have no ethical objection to it at all.
Most of those pages are not read by people. A record that exists but is never encountered has done nothing for you.
Every listing is a standing obligation. Each one is a copy of your details that you do not control and are nonetheless responsible for. When you move, change a number or drop a service, every one of them is now wrong, and wrong details are worse than absent details because a stranger who rings a dead number concludes something about you rather than about the listing.
Copies propagate. Details published on one site get picked up by others without your involvement, so an error made once can turn up in places you never visited, and correcting the original does not necessarily correct the copies.
Getting off is harder than getting on. That asymmetry is the whole subject of the removal ladder, and it is worth knowing before you submit rather than after.
So the argument against bulk submission is mostly arithmetic. A small number of relevant, maintained places that you can list on one page and check twice a year is defensible. A hundred is not, and whether a directory is worth your time at all has honest branches ending in no, including a branch about us.
Not findability: content that answers a query without answering the person
This one is grey, and the grey is worth naming honestly rather than pretending the boundary is sharp.
The pattern is writing that exists because a phrase gets typed, rather than because the writer had something to say. You can usually tell from the inside: if you could not explain to a customer why the page exists, other than that it might be encountered, it is on the wrong side.
That is not the same as writing about ordinary questions. A page answering the thing customers actually ask you every week is completely legitimate, and it is one of the more useful things a small business can put on a website. The difference is whether the answer comes out of your experience of doing the work, or out of a decision that a page should exist and a search for something to fill it with.
The test we would apply: could you have written it, would a customer be better off having read it, and does it say anything you could be wrong about? Content assembled from other people's summaries fails all three, and it fails them for the reader before it fails them for anyone else.
Not findability: reviews you arranged
Arranged means arranged in any form: written by you or for you, exchanged with another business, incentivised in a way the reader would not guess, or filtered so that only the good ones are collectible.
Asking a genuine customer whether they would leave an honest review is normal and fine. The line is crossed when the reader would change their mind about the review if they knew how it came to exist.
This is the item on the list where the harm is most direct, because reviews are read as testimony from someone with nothing to gain. That is the entire mechanism, and arranging them empties it out.
It is also, for us, the least detectable of the four, and we are not going to claim otherwise. We do not publish ratings or reviews of anyone, so we have no review corpus to police. What we can say is what we do with our own coverage: any claim we repeat about a business is either something a named reviewer checked and dated, or something the operator published, quoted and attributed. There is no third category, and how to read a review section properly is the reader's side of the same problem.
Which of these would get a business refused here, and why
Our bar is published in full at our entry bar, including every automatic exclusion. Here is how the four map onto it.
| The pattern | The criterion it fails | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Pages that exist only to be found | The entry must be a real thing a person can buy, use, hire, read or visit today, and a named reviewer must be able to describe it in our own words | A site made mostly of generated combination pages gives a reviewer nothing to describe. Refused. |
| Bulk submission | None directly | Not a refusal reason. Submitting to us is free and submitting elsewhere is your business. It affects nothing here in either direction. |
| Content that exists for a query | The entry must not be primarily an advertising, affiliate, dropship, lead-generation or content-farm vehicle | If the site is essentially a content vehicle with a business attached rather than a business with a site, it fails. A real business that also has some thin pages does not. |
| Arranged reviews | The operator's own claims we repeat must be quoted and attributed, or omitted | We publish no ratings, so there is nothing to inflate. Claims we cannot attribute are simply left out of the entry. |
Two honest qualifications.
We cannot detect most of this reliably, and we are not going to pretend we can. A named reviewer looks at a site and forms a judgement about whether there is a real thing behind it. That is a human process with a human error rate, it is described at our method, and it will sometimes be wrong in both directions. What fails our bar collects the patterns we actually see, fully anonymised, and we never name a refused business.
A refusal is not an accusation. It means the submission did not clear a published bar on the day it was looked at. It does not mean we think anyone did anything wrong, and our removal notes are written specifically so they cannot be read as allegations. That constraint, and the others like it, sit on what we refuse to publish.
Why the honest version is slower and what you get for it
We should not sell the honest route as though it were also the fast one. It is slower, and that is a real cost paid by real people with bills.
The slowness is structural. Work that only helps a machine can be produced in bulk, because nothing has to be true and nothing has to be specific. Work that helps a person cannot: the sentence describing what you sell has to be accurate, the availability note has to be updated, the reply has to be written by somebody. Volume is not available to you, and volume is the thing that produces quick movement.
What you get is not a promise, because we make none, and no honest person can tell you what any of this will produce for your business.
What you get is that the work does not decay against you. A clear first sentence keeps working. A contact route somebody monitors keeps working. Details that are accurate stay accurate with modest effort. Nothing you have built has to be quietly dismantled later, and there is no version of the next few years in which you have to explain something.
There is also a smaller, real benefit: you stop spending attention on it. Operators who take the other route spend a surprising amount of energy monitoring whether the thing they built is still standing. That energy is not free either.
If you want the priority order for the slow version with no money attached, being findable with no budget is written as a sequence rather than a wish list.
In Plain English
Findability is making it easier for the right person to recognise you. Anything that only makes it easier for a machine to encounter you is a different activity, and it is not what this section covers.
Four things fall outside: pages generated to exist rather than to be read, mass submission to listing sites you will never maintain, writing produced because a phrase gets typed rather than because you had something to say, and reviews arranged in any form. The first and third can cost you a place in our register, the second is simply low value, and the fourth is the one that damages the reader most.
The honest route is slower and that is a genuine cost. What it buys is work that does not have to be undone.
Questions about the boundary
Is any of this against the rules?
We do not say, because we do not know and it is not our subject. We make no claims about what search engines permit or how they respond, and we do not treat anyone's published guidelines as though they were law. What we can tell you is what fails our own bar, which is published and versioned.
I did some of this years ago. Am I refused forever?
No. The bar is applied to what is there when a reviewer looks, not to a history. If the site today is a real business a reviewer can describe, that is what gets assessed.
Someone I know does all of this and is doing well. Are they wrong?
Possibly not, and we are not in a position to judge their business. The four patterns above are things we can describe and can decline to publish. Nothing in this post is an accusation about any particular person, and we never name one.
Read the entry bar for what actually determines inclusion, the line for what we refuse to publish about anyone, and how directories work if you want the mechanics of the category behind all of this.