I do not know why people think Aviva is a great directoy. Look here >> http://www.avivadirectory.com/Directories/, Aviva looks like a Link Farm with nearly 50 Outgoing links. Do you think having so many listings serves any usefull purpose.
Shows your intelligence. Who says 50 links makes it a farm? The owner obviously belives showing 50 links is better than showing 20 and having pagination. There is always a reson for a decision, dont jump to conclusions without thinking about both sides of the argument...
I do not have to show any intellegence to you or someone else. I will just show some Common sense. Having 50 links is useless for a Human Visitor as most will not go throught the whole list. That's why people say it is better to be top of page 2 than being at the end of page 1. And, having your site listed with 50 other sites does not provide any SEO benefit.
While Chris is fearless - the bulldozer Jeff is the tactician They are different- but both with more than enough leadership qualities. In my book- they are still my leaders - and leaders of the directory industry.
I think different people will have different views to this. Why jump to page two when you have not completed page 1? Do you do this when reading a book or installation instructions? I have not yet had the privelege to have 50 links in any one category but once I approach the 15 mark I will then decide whether it will be 15, 20 or more. Everybody has their own reasons for how they deal with directories. It could simply be content, optimsation or some other reason. This is not proven and we can all only speculate regarding this.
They may be "awesome", but at this time they are penalised. All the time this remains the case I very much doubt you get any SEO benefit from a listing there - link juice or anchor text. This being the case, the only onther benefit of paying is for the traffic I guess (which wont be a lot). Of course they will probably come back in the future though, when back within the "rules". Whether they have permanently lost their ability to pass PR and anchor text nobody will ever know