what's the dealio with directories?

I'm curious about something here. I've been watching the sites for sale section here pretty regularly watching for anything like an older directory with 20-40K pages. What I'm seeing is a ton of brand new directories being sold. Typically no page rank, month or two old, and only a couple hundred entries. Yet the bidding on them tends to be fast and furious and they go for $40-$200 routinely.

What the heck am I missing? What are people doing with these site that would justify paying anything for what seems to me to be something you could recreate in a short period of time? (not trying to downplay a business model. I'm just stumped and curious ).

 

A good question.

Some of the sites are definately a bit over priced but it depends on the value of your time. If the owner has spent quite a few hours or days creating the site, adding relevant, well thought-out categories, and doing the initial link building and marketing then the price you mentioned woud be quite reasonable.

Most of us don't look at it this way, including myself, but it could cost us $200-$1000 worth or our time that we could be spending more wisely.

On the other hand, if the directory is poorly designed, has no backlinks and has a lot of duplicate content then it is worth very little.

 

Beats me, I guess those directories would have hundreds or thousands of links which takes a lot of work, so buyers probably like to snatch them up instead and have a nice link count straight away.

 

Most of them appear to be the same scripts with the same content too. I don't understand. I would buy old directories with lots of indexed pages, but it is just crazy how people are just reselling the same directory over and over.

I guess it is smart on the part of the seller, but dumb buyers.

chad

 

I agree. I rate directories and will be making a note (as I have done in the past) of the duplicate sites.

 

Hmm, didn't realize they were going for that. /me considers putting Blackfox on sale. lol