No longer profiting from the illegal marijuana industry, is Weedmaps still a viable business?

If you haven’t heard already, Weedmaps is making major changes to how they do business by no longer allowing illegal marijuana dispensaries and mail order marijuana sites to list companies on their business directory.

Now Weedmaps didn’t do this out of any sense of morality.. Founded in 2008, Weedmaps has ignored cease-and-desist orders in the past and now feeling the pressure from state regulators and licensed businesses to stop profiting from untaxed and unregulated dispensaries.

Weedmaps no longer doing business with black market pot shops

This is what happens when cannabis is legalized, when real tax revenues are realized… The marijuana black market is now under attack from all angles.

Weedmaps put out a really lame press release, now the champions of social justice for minorities.

“Minorities make up the majority of the unlicensed business owners in the cannabis industry–and the overwhelming majority of them want to operate out of the shadows,” noted Julian Canete, president and CEO of the California Hispanic Chambers of Commerce.

“The best way to address the unlicensed cannabis problem, promote small, minority-owned businesses, and correct social injustice is simple: give more cannabis business licenses to the people who deserve them. The Weedmaps initiative will provide minority entrepreneurs with the skills, tools and resources they need to compete for those licenses. And get them.”

Weedmaps isn’t serving the best interests of minorities, they’ve been making money from criminal enterprises that profit from the illegal sales of marijuana. There is nothing noble about that.

Is Weedmaps dead? Do they still have a viable business model?

This is more than simply listing illegal dispensaries on their directory, they’ll no longer offer other services such as POS systems, online order support, and delivery logistics unless you have a state license number. That will be the case for Canadian companies as well.

I’ve talked to people that have paid Weedmaps before to promote their services. Now I don’t know the current rate card, but one person said they paid $1200 a month to list their website and others said they coughed up a lot more depending on the number of service areas they bought.

Legal dispensaries won’t pay this type of money for placement on a directory every month, and they have multiple options available to them at a fraction of the cost when it comes to software and other services required to support the operations side of their businesses.

Weedmaps might not be dead in the water, but with 550 employees listed on Linkedin, you can eventually expect major layoffs coming up…

Can Weedmaps survive without their best paying customers and now competing in the new legal cannabis era? Maybe their SEO will be a major success factor moving forward. Let’s find out…

SEO audit for Weedmaps (weedmaps.com)

DR Rank – 81
DR stands for Domain Rank, it’s a score used to determine the authority of your website in search engine rankings. This is also commonly referred to as DA (Domain Authority) depending on the SEO tool you are using.

Referring Domains – 8888
This is the total number of domains or websites that link back to weedmaps.com

Referring Pages – 1,009,951
This is the total number of pages that link back to weedmaps.com

Backlinks – 1,724,031
This is the number of actual links back to weedmaps.com

Dofollow Backlinks – 1,631,099
DoFollow links are powerful because these types of links tell Google to pay attention to the site they are linking to and increases the authority score of that website

Nofollow Backlinks –  67,804
NoFollow backlinks are still important, but tells Google to essentially ignore them and doesn’t pass link juice that increases the authority rank of the website they’re linking to

Search Keywords by Position Rank
Search keywords by position are the search terms people use when searching on Google and link back to Weedmaps. Being #1 on Google is huge, but the value also depends on how often people search for those keywords.

Search Keywords By Volume
Search keywords by volume is the actual number of searches for a specific keyword or term on Google. You don’t need to be ranked #1 for a keyword with big search volumes for huge SEO wins and can often be more valuable than ranking #1 if more people are coming to your website with that search volume.

So where does WeedMaps get their backlinks? We’ve listed a few to find out how they get their traffic every month..