Disclosure

Featured Placements

Quad Cities Home Pros may feature certain businesses in a “Featured Pro” slot at the top of category pages. Featured placements are always labeled with a visible “Featured” badge so visitors can distinguish them from standard directory listings.

Featured placements may be provided to businesses in which the site operator has an ownership interest, or may be sold to third parties. The presence of a featured placement does not constitute an endorsement of that business, and the label makes the commercial nature of the placement clear.

Businesses can review current featured placement pricing on the advertise page.

Listing Independence

Standard (non-featured) listings appear based on relevance, geographic coverage and the factors described under How We Rank Businesses below — never on payment. A business does not need to pay to appear in the directory. Featured placements are additional, labeled placements that do not affect the inclusion or ordering of standard listings.

Ratings and Reviews

Rating and review counts displayed on this site are sourced from public business listings, not collected by us, and shown as plain text alongside the source and the date they were last checked. We do not display review text from third-party platforms. Ratings are one input to the recommended ordering of standard listings; they have no bearing on paid placement, which is sold separately and labeled.

Claimed, Verified and Sponsored

These three labels mean different things, and we keep them separate on purpose. Paid placement cannot make a business appear claimed or verified.

Claimed: The business owner has taken control of the listing and confirmed its details. It means the information comes from the business itself. It does not mean we have checked it.
Verified: We checked specific details ourselves and the profile says which ones — for example the phone number, the website, or a contractor registration. Verification cannot be bought.
Sponsored: The business paid for placement in a labelled slot. It is not a recommendation, it is not a verification, and it has no effect on the ordering of standard listings.

Where a business is marked Verified, its profile lists which details we checked. A badge that does not say what was checked would not be telling you anything.

How We Rank Businesses

The default Recommended order is calculated from the following, weighted so that the first factor matters most:

Review score, adjusted for how many reviews. A 5.0 from one review is weaker evidence than a 4.9 from three thousand, so ratings are weighted by review volume rather than compared as raw stars. This is the largest factor.
Verified, then claimed. A business whose details we have checked ourselves ranks above one the owner has claimed, which in turn ranks above one that is neither. These are different things and are weighted differently. Neither is for sale.
Profile completeness. Whether the listing gives you what you need to make contact and decide — phone, website, location or service area, hours, and a description of the work.

Paid placement has no effect on this ranking. Sponsored listings appear in a separate, clearly labelled slot and are never mixed into recommended results.

You can also sort by highest rating, most reviews, or business name, which ignore the factors above and use only what they name.

What we do not yet account for

Whether the trade is one of the business's core services. Listings are filtered so that suppliers, retailers and unrelated businesses do not appear, but we cannot yet confirm that a given trade is a company's main line of work.
Whether the business has confirmed it serves your city. Service areas are currently estimated from each business's location. Once owners confirm their own coverage, a confirmed match will rank above an estimated one.

Questions

If you have questions about how listings or featured placements work, please use the removal or correction link on the relevant business page to get in touch.