can dead links in these dir. hurt your ranking, and if so any long term plans on how to limet the potential risk of dead links
No. It doesn't matter whether they are incoming links or outgoing links, dead links can't affect SE rankings (except of course a dead incoming link no longer adds anything to PageRank). It can be annoying to your visitors, on the other hand - a website with a lot of dead links looks like a ghost town. I highly recommend Xenu Link Checker (freeware) -- run this on your website once a month or so and use the report it generates to update broken and redirected links on your site.
Thanks for that Minstrel..I don't usually download software that is recommended in forums but I figured I could trust it. I'm glad I did, I really like that interface. Im checking the 1000's of urls in Kwik Goblin right now Cheers added - All pages, by result type: ok 4660 URLs 98.21% no such host 33 URLs 0.70% forbidden request 23 URLs 0.48% not found 10 URLs 0.21% server error 4 URLs 0.08% no info to return 3 URLs 0.06% connection aborted 11 URLs 0.23% parameter incorrect 1 URLs 0.02% Total 4745 URLs 100.00% Its amazing that a big part of the "no such host" were Coop Links - There are quite a few dead ads in the system it seems. That tool makes a pretty good site map too.
The only paid directories that are worth it for me so far is yahoo ( and you can get in free) and MSN. Other directories can get banned, go belly up, or start doing bad things... Freebie dir are very good get into all the ones you can
I've been using Xenu for several years now -- don't know what I'd do without it The "dead links" in the coop ads are probably typos -- I've clicked on a few myself with obvious spelling mistakes in the URL.