Paid Directory Listings - making directory links worthwhile and whats it worth?

[Dominic]

There are a number of directories which are free, but with the ones that do charge:

Q1. What do you look for when paying for a listing?
Q2. What do you avoid?

The value of a Yahoo directory listing is arguable - what would a directory need to offer for you...

Q3. To pay $40 or more
Q4. To pay more than once only (e.g. annually)?

Q5. Which directories that you have paid for inclusion in the past would you pay for again if you were promoting a new site?

PS - I'm aware there are general and specialty directories... please speak to both if it's relevant to your experience.
_

[Dominic]

Has noone paid to be included in a directory?

[l234244]

Would be intresting to hear people's experience with yahoo directory, i.e traffic, backlink and if they feel the price to be included is good value.

[quadcity]

Would be intresting to hear people's experience with yahoo directory, i.e traffic, backlink and if they feel the price to be included is good value.
Unless you have a large marketing budget, I would skip Yahoo for the first year and submit to several high-quality one time fee directories. Also one or two one-year submissions to get a jump-start on PR. wowdirectory.com one year sponsored submission is a good value for $20.

Try yahoo after that. If it isn't worthwhile, don't renew. (Yahoo links are now redirects.)

That is what I am doing right now.

- Mike T.

[Dominic]

We has a better budget once and listed in Yahoo (very limmited now), and get negligable traffic from it. Also the very short dodgy description and title they give you in the listing is what turns up in the yahoo serps (yuk).

MSN Small business directory isn't sending traffic yet but worthwhile for the links if you can afford it.

Bluefind can also be a valuable link if you can afford it, but no traffic to us yet.

Well, this is what we find, any other thoughts on MSN small business or bluefind in terms of traffic?

[juke]

I don't find a good value to submitting to the yahoo directory. I find submitting to smaller paid directories are better bang for your buck. for the price that you pay for 1 yahoo listing you can submit your link 10-20 paid directories which will give you a BL and possible anchor text ranking. Typically this directories charge a one time fee and on the other hand yahoo charges an annual fee to be listed.

[Dominic]

I don't find a good value to submitting to the yahoo directory. I find submitting to smaller paid directories are better bang for your buck. for the price that you pay for 1 yahoo listing you can submit your link 10-20 paid directories which will give you a BL and possible anchor text ranking. Typically this directories charge a one time fee and on the other hand yahoo charges an annual fee to be listed.

Very good point James, I agree.

[Richmond, Virginia SEO]

What about Buzzle.com? Has anyone submitted to them. It costs $59 to do so.

[brandondrury]

I don't understand the directories that charge money but don't send any traffic worth noting and fail to show up as a backlink.

What are these directories doing?

Many of them are recommended on this forum and I just don't see what I'm buying.

Brandon

[dvduval]

Over on www.businessplexus.com we just charge for featured listings. I get a couple each day, so I assume people consider it to be worthwhile.

[Justilien]

I pay for directory listing all the time. Couple of things I take into account.

-recent cache
-age of site
-something on the Greenbar as a "litmus" test
-other sites listed in the category (are they my competition, quality, etc)
-static links
-do they sell links or sitewides off their homepage
-quality of their backlinks
-possibility of traffic

[Estrange]

As a directory owner I agree with Juke and Justilien.
Especially Justiillien's criterias are so logical.
But to be honest, I wouldn't expect to get decent traffic from these directories, even DMOZ or MSND.
How many of you guys search at directories to find product or service, or what is the percentage of your whole total search.
What I do is; search at Google or MSN, then follow to the most relevant link.

[smindsrt]

I pay for directory listing all the time. Couple of things I take into account.

-recent cache
-age of site
-something on the Greenbar as a "litmus" test
-other sites listed in the category (are they my competition, quality, etc)
-static links
-do they sell links or sitewides off their homepage
-quality of their backlinks
-possibility of traffic

I would say this is a great list of things to look for. Good job Justilien! :)

[dvduval]

Yep, nothing on the green bar means no dinero from me. :)
I also stay away from directories where it's just a bunch of junk in the category I am submitting to.

[onedollar]

Nice points Justilien.

There's also one more point (especially for those who advertise with ppc engines)
The advantage of a paid directory which offers permanent listings is that you do not pay for any clicks but only for one-time cost. just submit and move on to the other paid promotions.

[onedollar]

having a good plan for submitting to paid directories is also important.

the best way it works is to keep a fixed amount of amount (lets say about 10-40% of your online marketing budget) for submitting to paid directories which offer permanent listings.

each month use this budget to submit to few paid directories, each month you submit, you get new directories to submit to and new links for your site. works great !

[Richmond, Virginia SEO]

Yes, I couldn't agree more. Adding paid directories to our SEO tasks have made a huge difference. We were taking the cost of some them on ourselves but now charge our clients about $3000 for the first year to submit to the ones we feel are important.

[spondishy]

I use directories as it is the easiest way to get one-way links. I submit to all the free directories I can find, but have a list of about 20-25 paid directories I submit to. I normally order this list based on a few factors such as how cluttered the category is I'm submitting to and the perceived "value" I have of the individual directory.

[Tim_Myth]

I pay for directory listings depending on the price. I'll submit to pretty much any directory that is < $3 per link. More than that, and the page I'm submitting to better pass a lot of PR. Since Yahoo uses redirects, and doesn't pass $300 worth of PR, they are not worth it in my opinion. If my advertising budget were in the hundreds of thousands, it might be a different story, but I'm not quite in that category yet! ;)

In many cases though I feel the link is not worth the price being charged. The "sweet spot" for pricing is in the $2-$6 range. Look at the economics of a directory:

First of are all the costs associated with running a directory. A really decent shared hosting account and domain namew can be had for $100, in most cases less. A good directory script will run you $50-$100. The only other cost is the time factor. How much time goes in to reviewing a submission, and how much does the webmaster want to make per hour? If you want to make $30 per hour, and you spend 10 minutes reviewing one site, you need to charge at least $5 per link. Add an extra $1 for the hosting and software costs, and you bring the total up to $6. How many directories charge more than that? They're obviously charging for teh value of the link at that point, or they spent way too much on hosting or software (or they think their time is really valuable).

On the other hand are the "dollar per link" directories. These are people that either spend little to no time reviewing your link, got free software, know how to find a good deal on hosting, or have another way to monetize the directory. Use my new paid directory for example (after5webdesign.com, but I'll try not to make this blatant advertising). I know a lot of great deals on hosting, and I did my math to determine the size of hosting account I would need. As a result, my hosting costs are about $30 a year including domain. I used phpLD (phplinkdirectory.com) for the script, and sent David $25. Now comes my time factor. I do spend about 5-10 minutes reviewing a site before including it, and I figure $20/hr is a decent second income (I have a day job as the name implies). This means that I should charge about $4 per link. However, I wanted to give a better value to distinguish myself from other directories, so I modified my directory script to make one submit form update other directories that I own. As a result, inclusion in the one paid directory also results in one way links from 2 other directories. This in effect means that one web site review is the equivalent of 3 web site reviews. In other words, I can divide my costs by three and still be profitable. Given that I've had 58 submissions in my first 30 days, I think it's working quite well.

[muchacho]

Interesting post Tim... but too many maths for me :D

[Richmond, Virginia SEO]

Most of my paid directory submissions are showing up as backlinks in all three SEs. I'd say that is worth it, considering the time spent on submitting to free directories that may never get picked up.

[Tim_Myth]

I guess I did forget to include one other reason why some directories only charge a buck: Spam Blocking. Many spammers are much less likely to spend any money on submitting their site to a directory. $1 is a very reasonable amount to keep out the casual spammers.

[muskur]

No one makes a search in Directories but Directories help you to be found by their SEO Feature.

[Blogspotter]

And how much do you guys spend on link building for a directory site?

[taohai]

actually I've no idea of directory submit before.

it seems necessary after reading all your experiences.

[simey]

Maybe not necessary, but it can be a good start to getting your site noticed in the search engines.

[lowster11]

I'd have to say that if you paid $10 or less for a regular submission into a paid directory and every time you did a back-link check that link was still there for a year or more, then that was $10 well spent. Spending $50 to $90 a year for a listing into a paid directory is just not for me, that $10 link is going to be just as valuable as a $90/yr link a year or two down the road.

[vicdigi]

There are certain criteria to take in such as the following:

Directories that are found by search engines, especially Google
New directories that show potential, research them even if they have lesser pagerank
Directories that are not stuffed with crap sites
Good design and navigation
Price of link and placement
Is it permanent link - always good
Is it yearly subscription, in which case does the directory get high traffic
How many pages of the site are indexed in Google and Yahoo of the site

I take all of the above into consideration when making a submission.

[BungeeBones]

I think Return On Investment (ROI) is a constant practice for anyone purchasing any type of traffic. See Calculate Return On Investment (ROI) For Link Exchange at my Bungeebones.com blog

That is true even if you buy newsprint ads (yuck!)

[junki]

I have heard that link from paid directories gain a very bad reputation so I avoid all those paid directory wensites.