There will always be those who say it's not worth it. Usually, it's those who have sites that they don't feel are worth spending any money on.
Well the difference is Paid Submissions give you Priority and Guaranteed Listings. So, 100 Free submissions and 10 Paid submissions are almost equal per my experience. . If you have enough time and patience you can got for Free sites. The job is hectic. I am talking about Paid PR 1-PR4 directories here. Not the top ones. They do the work perfectly these days. I got a list of such directories.. I submitted my site to around 10 sites, paying them in the range of $2 to $8. Some of them even gave Featured Listings for cheap price. And it really worked. My One Month Old directory got a Page rank 1 on Dec 30th google PR update.
Yes, paid directory are very valuable. If you just take a look you can see a lot of paid directories pR rank are very good, while free directories are not so good pr rank. I will recommend you to go with both free, reciprocal and payment directories.
if there are quality paid directory and you are getting quality back links then you can submit in to paid directory otherwise you can also try for the good Free directory sites too.
the algo for google these days is moving more and more towards being influenced by trust and authority factors, so you want to submit your website to directories that have domain trust and authority overall and also, therefore quite frequently, have page authority-trust as well. of course your anchor text is one of the most important factors on that relevant page in that authoritative/trusted directory. i submit to both free and paid directories and quite frequently check out and compare the domain age, page rank, prices, and backlink profiles of the paid directories, and also quite importantly if the page i'm submitting to is cached by google and also who else is on that page; i don't know of those many free directories other than dmoz that have been around for more than 2-4 years though i'm just calling that off the top of my head. the real authoritative directories are well edited and maintained, have little to no spam, have been around for a few years or more, are sometimes listed in yahoo and/or dmoz, which are the authoritative seed-directories on the internet (thereby passing authority and trust to those directories/website they list and hence to your submisson). so yes, some/many paid directories, especially those that have been around for a number of years and are well edited with good categories that are cached etc, are often worth the investment (and it doesn't matter if that page has no page rank it's the authority/trust juice that it's passing to your page and domain that's the most important factor now, plus the value gained by having a good anchor text) - it's relatively easy to tell the difference between the higher quality paid directories and the sites they list and most/many of the free ones. and it's also a good idea in the paid directories to submit deep links if available as that helps pass the authority juice around within your site (which of course ought to have a good internal linking structure so the page rank juice and the trust/authority juice from the inbound links can circulate) there are also tools like over at seomoz where you can go to rather test the overall trust/authority of a directory/domain, their trifecta tool, another useful tool....
It really depends, really. However, I have seen directories whose owners claim to have good traffic, good listings, good this and good that, bla bla bla....and yet they have a big fat PR0 for all their talk. Now, I will never suggest that you evaluate a directory based on PR alone. However their boasting just doesn't match the talk. So it is important that you ditch these kind of directories and evaluate a directory based on all possible factors...not just PR, not just traffic, but both and much more.
Post like this I rarely reply to...To me with the questions like this is like saying, "Are people all the same?" Well if you meant do they have two arms and two legs a mouth with a set of eyes?, yes in that sense. Depends on what directory you want to submit to, some are more pricier than others and some directories are promoted more and that comes with a price that is past on to the consumers. Do a search on that particular directory first, Free or Paid. Type any of the listed site into the Search Engines, if the site shows up, then it's a good directory. Over half of the Free directories might even be harmful to your site, so be cautious. At $200 a year, it is unlikely worth it. The year goes by so fast that before you know it, you need to renew it for another year. SEO-ing takes time. The better questions is, "How much do you want to pay to get your site listed".
Well, at least somebody in this thread is asking right question. Only few directories that I know will give you more than 1 backlink. Ideally backlinks should come from personalized pages such as “More Infoâ€, Rate usâ€, “Reviews†and of course general listing page. People who are paying for listing in high PR directories as a rule don’t realize that they are paying for 1 backlink only simply because all they care is PR completely ignoring amount of pages with links to their site that in reality has been indexed by Google. Will I pay BOTW and Yahoo $400.00 for two backlinks? Hell NO! For that amount of money, I will find 20 or more directories whereas each will give me 2 or 3 backlinks and leave BOTW and Yahoo for those who want to buy 1 $300.00 high PR backlink. fastreplies
But I guess $300 for Yahoo is of Worth. You should also consider the PR of the "page" your link is appearing. Well only DMOZ and Yahoo has got High PR for All internal pages. You can find 20 other directories with good PR for 300-400. I agree. But if you check the PR of inner pages, most of them will be N/A. Our site gets a PR from the page where it is listed. And it is again divided to all the links in the same page. So, the page should have a PR like 6 or higher for you to get a Quality inbound Link. So, in my opinion, a $300 Yahoo listing is still worth. I exclude BOTW though. For 300 you get a One Way Backlink from a Page with PR 5-6.
My friend just get PR6 for one for his blog and that is after he using paid directories. So that just tell it really work
OK, you got your backlink from PR 8 site. Now what? I hope you do realize that your site won’t get any boost in SERP just because you have backlinks from high PR sites. As far as Google concern, your SERP position depends on SEO and not on PR But then again, if you want to impress your friend and tell them that your site has PR of 5, then sure by all the means pay $300.00 and have a ball. As to getting backlinks from internal pages with PR and pay for that, I have news for you: link is a link is a link no matter where it comes from. fastreplies
I think those free directories are quite good,but the fault is it will cost a long time to reviewed before accepted in those directories.
I find it quite interesting that you correlate paid as being quality. Have you ever stopped to think that some paid directories just charge a fee to create a sense of importance. I'm sure that there are many just as many paid directories that are crap. It's just that fee makes people feel otherwise. And to whomever decided to give me negative rep on my comment, that's very funny. You should wake up to the fact that just because a directory has revenue doesn't mean that they use it to invest in advertising. They can, and I'm sure that several do, but it's not a guarantee!
I submit to any directory, as much as I can do. That's my way to build as many as backlinks I can. My goal is receiving more traffic (organic traffic) by improving my website's serp position. I start with free ones, well if there is no more free one left to submit and if still need better results, then I consider paid listings. Free or paid they both mean only 1 backlink. It depends on your goal.