Currently they are offering a permanent position for just $249, I think it's pretty great and planning to submit one of my service site. What'd you think?
It is worth what submtters are willing to pay and they seem to be getting submissions. Only you can say if it is worth it for yourself.
Yep but still the only thing that matters to submitters is ROI, which is pretty objective and measurable by quantitative results. So I think it's not correct how you put it in this situation.
I have over ten botw listings. The traffic you will receive is very, very small - not enough to justify the listing fee imo. It is one of three directories Matt Cutts has mentioned in the past as directories he would submit to (yahoo and DMOZ were the other two). I think a yahoo listing carries much more weight, but it's also an annual fee listing. A BOTW listing is part of a well rounded SEO campaign. I wouldn't expect to see anything but a small increase in SERPS - but if you're in the top 20 and trying to move into the top 10, then it would probably be worth it. A listing isn't going to work miracles - if you don't have good rankings before, you're not going to see them after just adding a listing.
Similarly to when someone asks how much a domain is worth and will often be told that its worth whatever the buyer is willing to pay, id honestly say i dont know how much thinks like listings are worth. But i wouldn't knock anyones charging price as its not my business and simply not fair to challenge the price. Id hate to have it done to me after all.
Not sure how you think what I said is not correct. All I said was if the submitters are willing to pay that fee then it is obvious they feel it is worth the price of admission. Otherwise they would not submit. Right? Many people don't feel the same way about $249 as you do. To businesses and corporations that is not much money. Value is derived from what consumers are willing to pay for an item, whatever it may be. For you $249 may be overpriced, for me it may also be more than I am willing to pay, but not for everyone. Since botw continues to get submissions there seems to be enough who think the pricing is fair. Might as well ask if Business.com or Yahoo are over priced also. They seem to continue to get submissions so apparently there are enough who feel the pricing is fair.
So you don't feel it was worth it but submitted there over ten times. Why did you keep submitting if it was not worth the fee?
It's mostly companies who use these directories, the cost is nothing. The company I work for has a listing in Yahoo and Business.com, and the $500 it costs is a drop in the bucket compared to all of the other things they buy or subscribe to! It just becomes difficult for any individual or blogger to justify spending $300 on something that has never been proven to show results of any kind.
Where did I say it was or wasn't worth the fee? The direct traffic you receive from a yahoo, botw or DMOZ listing never justify the listing price or even submission effort. It's the benefit of helping you with natural SERPS that is the key. Obviously, if I didn't think it had any benefit other than direct traffic, I wouldn't pay for listings. I spend around $10K a year on yahoo directory listings, but if I had to judge the benefits of a listing based only on the direct traffic a listing produces, I would be spending $0.00. Same with DMOZ (which is free). I have a number of sites that have been listed for years. The traffic is minimal (and I'll bet a good portion of it is other webmasters or SEO's) but I still take the time to submit (and forget) because I know google still gives a listing at least some weight.
My mistake - now I see what you meant. The listing is worth it because of serp benefits but not worth it for traffic benefits alone.
I wouldn't have thought Corporations would be interested in BOTW. Wouldn't they go for Yell.com instead?
I dont think that coporations think in terms of one or the other neccessarily. In my opinion the expense of getting listed in these sites is such a minimal part of their marketing budget they probably just submit all those they see as important.
We paid just over £2000 for some premium 12-month Yell.com listings, where we were apparently told we'd be shown top of every category for our products - that was, of course (which they didn't mention) - until somebody else bought into the same deal. We haven't had any sales (to our knowledge) that Yell has passed on to us, all we've received is dodgy Chinese furniture companies offering their "chep" and "discunt" furniture
BOTW has employed a number of people to build categories and add unsubmitted sites solely because they would be useful to a searcher and is one of the handful of directories that actually has content that real people would find useful. In other words it does not exist solely for the purposes of extracting money from webmasters in the unlikely event that they will get a significant boost in SERPs. It is quite possible that SEs have not devalued its links as heavily, as they say they do, for the majority of directories. A slightly worrying indication that they might be a bit dubious is that they have copied much of their category structure from Dmoz, also they have thousands of empty categories. These attributes are often hallmarks of the quick buck brigade. Since they seem (at least for now) to be creating something worthwhile, and perhaps they might be in it for the long term, a permanent listing may not be such a bad deal.
Forgetting the old rule of thumb: empty categories are better than dead, completely inaccurate category listings. Ironic that you mentioned Dmoz in the same sentence, too
Ahh... spidey, is that pay for inclusion I can smell on your breath. The odor is hard to describe, its a bit like the bovine excrement we were talking about earlier.