Member Avatar for MktgRob

Saw this in a newsletter I receive from a business publication that I read...

"Thomas Publishing Co. said Wednesday that it is immediately suspending U.S. operations of Thomas Global Register, an international industrial directory. The Web site will remain operational through Jan. 31, 2010.

Thomas Publishing cited “the unprecedented global economic downturn and the decline in marketing investment worldwide” for the move. It will continue to publish its individual country-focused Web sites and directories, including ThomasNet.com, Thomas Register of Indian Manufacturers and its Web-based offering Thomex, Guia-NEI, the leading industrial directory of Brazil, as well as additional product Web sites in France, Germany, Italy and Turkey, as well as other countries

Earlier this year, Thomas suspended the U.S. operations of IEN. Shortly afterward, a group including former employees bought the rights to the publication and plans a relaunch later this summer."

I am not certain if anyone uses links to the Thomas Register websites as part of their link building for SEO, but it looks like Thomas Register might be in its death throes. Keep this in mind to keep from having dead links on your site if you are linked to them.

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This thread — with contributions from , and — surfaces a durable SEO lesson: external directories and the services behind them can change, sometimes quickly, and forum accounts or employee posts may not settle every detail. The practical response is procedural, not argumentative. Treat directory links as potentially transient and put simple safeguards in place so link loss does not become a scramble later.

Inventory and verify before acting:

  • Create a backlink inventory (server logs, Google Search Console Links, or any backlink tool) and an on-site outbound-link list. Export CSVs for repeat checks.
  • Check link health (HTTP status, redirects, soft 404s) with an automated crawler or quick scripts. Flag high-authority referring pages first.
  • Mitigate proactively: replace or update outbound links that point to unstable targets; save a copy of public listing content (contact info, product descriptions) for reuse; claim/republish profiles on other reputable directories so inbound link value isn’t concentrated in one place. For inbound links owned by listings, request exports from the directory owner where possible.

Quick technical checks (example):

# single URL status
curl -I -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} %{url_effective}\n" "http://example.com"

# check list of URLs
while read url; do curl -I -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} %{url_effective}\n" "$url"; done < urls.txt

A few cautions: avoid knee-jerk removal of links without measuring referral traffic and anchor-text value first; do not assume a temporary outage equals permanent loss; and keep records of listings and screenshots so profile data can be rebuilt quickly if needed.

Member Avatar for BrendanOConnell

I am not certain if anyone uses links to the Thomas Register websites as part of their link building for SEO, but it looks like Thomas Register might be in its death throes. Keep this in mind to keep from having dead links on your site if you are linked to them.

MktgRob: Thanks for the post but I can assure you that ThomasNet is alive and doing very well - I know I work there.

Member Avatar for MktgRob

MktgRob: Thanks for the post but I can assure you that ThomasNet is alive and doing very well - I know I work there.

Brendan, good to hear it if it is so. But I, and probably alot of people on this forum, have worked for and with companies that said all was well when it was not. The fact that Thomas Register is shutting down some operations is established as Thomas announced it. The assumption, while not verifiable currently, is an easy one to make based on the current economy and the fact that Thomas has shut down some business and is planning the same for others. Either way, it is something that links websites to Thomas sites has to be aware of because it could impact the SEO efforts. Good luck and I hope the assumption is proved wrong.

Member Avatar for HazeyDaze

Thomas Register is online at ThomasNet.com.
Thomas Global Register is shutting down operations by sometime in 2010.
They are two very different entities, if you look at the sites, you'll notice they really don't have much to do with each other (besides the name, and the fact that they are directories).
If websites are using Thomas Global for links, yes, it could negatively impact your seo, since they have some time before the site goes dead, they should be looking at other international link sources, so as not to be playing catch-up when the time comes.

Member Avatar for MktgRob

Thomas Register is online at ThomasNet.com.
Thomas Global Register is shutting down operations by sometime in 2010.
They are two very different entities, if you look at the sites, you'll notice they really don't have much to do with each other (besides the name, and the fact that they are directories).
If websites are using Thomas Global for links, yes, it could negatively impact your seo, since they have some time before the site goes dead, they should be looking at other international link sources, so as not to be playing catch-up when the time comes.

Thanks for the back up on this one. I thought it weird that I was quoting from a published source quoting a Thomas rep and the Thomas employee who posted disputed the post. Good point on taking the time left to identify optional international link sources.

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