Launching BOTW Local
June 18th, 2008
I don’t often post about work stuff here, and almost never do I write about stuff in order to promote, but..
We officially brought BOTW Local to beta today, and I’m pretty psyched about it. We have spent the better portion of two years going crazy and screwing up other deadlines to get this out. We grossly underestimated the amount of work that would go into it, and we’re nowhere near “finished”.
The site is huge - like 16.5 million pages. So in an effort to not scare the hell out of the spiders we’re doing a somewhat slow roll out. Most of the site still contains “no-spider” tags. Thus far, we have only introduced the spiders to the following markets: Miami, New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Chicago and Austin. As we feel comfortable with the indexing and crawl rate of each market introduced, we introduce more. So far so good with tens of thousands of pages indexed, and many many pages ranking very well. More cities coming soon.
So all in all, it’s been a hell of a build. There’s still plenty more build to do with more than a few holes that need filling. And after that comes the really tough part - marketing and monetization. Oh the fun of new projects 
I’d encourage any business owners to claim your business - it’s free with the JumpStart page. The user account is a little unpolished, and the entire sign up process is in the final stages of a makeover, but the business pages work, and they’re free.
If you find something that sucks, let me know.
I hope that this offering proves to be as successful as we plan, and that you find it to be a useful resource for your local information needs.
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:02 am
[…] or perhaps to saturate branded or local search results on other engines. It’s worth noting Greg Hartnett’s notes on the size of the site and just how much it’s being crawled / indexed: The site is huge - like […]
June 24th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Greg, this is VERY exciting. Congratulations on launching. I am just poking my way around through the product this evening & will let you know if I see any hiccups. Looking forward to someone getting finally Local right & am sure that a company as smart and innovative as yours will be the one to do it!
Best,
dm
June 24th, 2008 at 10:30 pm
[…] Greg Hartnett, President of BOTW, is one of my very oldest friends in this industry (I met him shortly after starting my business in 2006). At a local San Francisco SEO meetup, he went out of his way to help me think through my career path in search marketing, and took the time to give a fledgling web designer a link in Best of the Web. […]
July 1st, 2008 at 8:37 am
Hi Greg
Congrats on the rollout, it must feel good to finally launch.
Reuben
July 23rd, 2008 at 1:13 pm
16.5 Million pages? OMG!! I’d be interested what you do with the sitemap for a site that big. I assume you’re using an XML sitemap? What about Google’s WebMaster Tools site, does that even cope with a site that big?
And what’s these “no-spider” tags, do you mean noindex?
August 18th, 2008 at 8:56 am
Though a bit late but I would definitely want to congratulate you guys. I have gone through it and yea it rocks.
Thumbs Up!