Listing Standards

Nobody applies to be listed

Listings are compiled from public business information. Businesses do not apply, pay, or opt in to appear, which means a business can be listed here without ever having heard of us. We think that is a reasonable way to build a directory that is useful on day one, but it puts the burden on us to be accurate and to make leaving easy. See corrections and removal below.

What earns a listing

A business is shown if all three are true.

1. It is in the Quad Cities market. Either its city is one of the 31 communities we cover, or it sits within 25 miles of the metro centre. Matching is on city and state — Princeton, Iowa is in this market and Princeton, Illinois is not.
2. It is a residential home-service trade. Contractors, not the businesses around them. Supply houses, hardware stores, trade unions, apprenticeship halls and national big-box retailers are excluded even when they rank well for the search.
3. It is reachable. A listing a homeowner cannot act on is not a listing.

What that removes, right now

These figures are read from the live directory, not written into this page.

Roughly half of what a broad search returns for this metro does not belong in it. Showing all of it would make the directory bigger and worse.

Hidden is not deleted

A business that fails the test is hidden from the directory, not erased from our records. Two reasons: our classification can be wrong and we want to be able to correct it, and a business can become eligible — a service area changes, a phone number starts working again. A hidden listing appears in no category, no search result and no sitemap we submit, and it asks search engines not to index it. Its own page keeps working, so a link someone already has does not break and the business can still claim or remove it.

If you would rather we held no record of your business at all, send a removal request and say so, or email info@quadcitieshomepros.com. We will delete it.

Where we get it wrong

The honest limit of this system: we can tell a supply house from a plumber by name, but we cannot reliably tell whether plumbing is a company’s core service or one line on a long list of things it will do. A general contractor that mentions drain work may appear under plumbing. That is a judgement call we have not automated, and it means some categories are broader than a homeowner would draw them.

Automated classification is a starting point, never the last word. A person can override any of it, and once a person has made a call, no later automated pass silently reverses it.

What the labels mean

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.

Ordering of standard listings is earned and never for sale. How that ordering is calculated is written out in full on the disclosure page.

Ratings come from somewhere, and we say where

Star ratings and review counts are sourced from public listings and are shown with their source and the date we last checked them. We do not publish the review text, and we do not present these ratings as our own assessment of a business.

Corrections, claims and removal

Every listing has a link to correct it, claim it, or ask for it to be taken down. Removal is the easiest of the three on purpose: we listed you without asking, so leaving should not be hard.

Claims and edits to a phone number, website or business name are the hardest, and deliberately so. We confirm ownership through a channel already on record for the business — usually by calling the number we already have — rather than trusting the contact details typed into the form. A competitor who could claim a rival’s listing and change its phone number would be stealing that business’s customers, so we would rather be slow than wrong.

Find your listing and make a change →

What we do not do

• We do not sell your details as a lead. Homeowners contact businesses directly.
• We do not sell position in the standard listings. Paid placement exists, it is labelled Sponsored, and it sits in its own slot.
• We do not remove a listing, or move it down, because a business declined to buy anything.