Bidding directories are great for management reasons, regardless of what you hear people saying they are no good because more and more show up all the time. They still are good and a great alternative to selling featured links. One thing I will say about them is they should offer a "paid bypass" for reciporcal trade options say at the $1 level and then leave it up to the submitter of the free link trade to pay up for higher rankings.
Cogger they may be great to make money from or for link buyers, the real point is whether or not they should be classed in the same group as the regular type directories.
Thanks for the reply. But are your suggesting that a Google employee (like Matt Cutts) would be more likely to take action against bidding directories because the submissions are accepted without being reviewed? That's what I wonder about.
Definately. The quality of links in a bidding directory is undoubtably lower than a normal directory - both because of the lack of reviewing and the "this guy paid $250 for his crap site and I am too greedy to refund" aspect of them.
Yes, normal directories do those things. But that doesn't change the stated fact that the order of listings in bidding directories is entirely a matter of how big is the budget of the submitter. The order is no direct reflection of quality in the submitted site.
Would you care to elaborate on why you like the concept and why you think it will work? I think the absolute opposite so it is definitely a leading question. Just wanted to be upfront about it.
Why I think starting a bidding directory is not a good idea... 1. No review? Are you kidding? Get ready to have every porno, scammer, gambler and other POS on the web find your site. Your site will quickly become a bad neighborhood. 2. Paid link + no review = link selling for PR purposes, as soon as someone reports your site for selling links you can watch it disappear from the SERPs and any PR disappear as well This is not a good idea for so many reasons but those 2 should be enough.
YMC There is many bid directories that review sites before aceptance. MIKEY the get rich quick/easily factor aplies also to regular directories! its not a phenomenon that appear in bidding directories only.
You are right scoobby that not all bid directories are auto-approval. I thought the OP wanted to make it auto-approve. On a second read of the thread - it was someone else who said that. Generally I think that creating a bidding directory is just challenging Google to ban for link sales.
@YMC you're 100% correct. @Scoobby you cant get rich quick with a normal directory. I have tried both and believe me I would know. I was one of the big bid directory owners and know for a fact you can get rich quick. One morning I woke up with over $6000 in my paypal account when I hadn't even done anything different to the week before. The entire "bidding" concept that draws in the casino affiliate webmasters who will pay $xxx for listings on all bid directories is enough to proove my point.
Your probably right Mikey, but what is their definition of rich, and for how long do they think this will last? I've decided to concede that if people are stupid enough to fall for that type of gimmick then who am I to interfere.
I thought it would be over by now, but as staff at phpLinkBid I am in a position to monitor some cool stuff and as far as I can see there is only more and more bidding directories being made. You can throw up 4 bid directories quickly for less than $200. 3 months later each one can have made over $1000 from all the casino bids - its just easy money to be honest. I've got 6 spare phpLB licenses so might do some experimenting
You have some good points there but, The bottom line is that it doesnt matter if you have a bid or normal directory but how you maintain it. I had seen normal directories have a dozen of sponsored links on homepage or sitewides that can easily make them so much money in a week.Also i have seen many normal and bidding directries do a form of link exchange or interlinking each other with fake bids or fake sponsored directories and we see the results of doing this. Of course i dont have proofs or names of these directories but everyone who is familiar with directories for some time know that.Also the point about casino sites is a trend that will stop when the guys with big $ from gambling will learn and know how can they spread their money and will not buy a link in a homepage that have 9 anchor text saying online casino.So as i said: The bottom line is that it doesnt matter if you have a bid or normal directory but how you maintain it.
I know where your coming from Mike. Me, I'm a long term player and want more than a grand for my labours. Don't take this as being big-headed but I have enough money to throw up hundreds of these things and make a killing if I wanted to but I honestly care about the directory industry and choose not to. If I'm totally honest though, if I didn't have bucks in the bank I probably would think of the QB.
I believe bid directories are better than general directories because almost all their categories have pr, well most bid directories that I have seen anyway.
Not very true, and if it was its only because bid directories only bother with main categories and therefore have more content. @scoobby, the way a bid directory is managed certainly helps, but at the end of the day they are made for webmasters and not for the end users.