Is it worth paying $15, 20, 30 for inclusion in old dirs? Eg: PR6 homepage, domain with 5+ years old ?
The only directory worth paying money for is yahoo's. And even that might not be worth the hundreds of dollars. I got a site in there 10 years ago before it went paid. I don't know if the site is still there, as it was a free site that people got with hosting. I still have the site, however, but it is a gateway. Been with earthlink now for over 12 years. But I digress. Directories are becoming less relevant to SEO. They used to rule the web, but google has effectively put an end to that. The DMOZ not withstanding. Stephen C
Paid directories are very useful....much more useful than free directories. Good free directories are hard to get listed in because of the demand for them. A "quality" free directory tends to reject upwards of 90% of submissions hence they are difficult to get in. Take DMOZ for example. Now of course, badly-run and poorly-maintained free directories will list anyone and everyone....but why would you want to bother with such garbage directories? Also, free directories spring up like weeds...and many of them die rather quickly. No one wants to spend hours submitting to hundreds of free directories when the good ones may or may not review/list your site, and the bad ones may be dead in a year (but they will still have your email address to spam you with!). Rather than spending alot of time on mostly useless free directories, I prefer to submit to a few older and respected paid directories. They tend to have higher page strength and are considered authority sites. I'd choose some (or all) of the following depending on budget and site niche: http://dir.yahoo.com/ ($299/yr) http://www.business.com/ ($299/yr) http://http//www.botw.org/ ($299) http://www.joeant.com/ ($40) http://www.goguides.org/ ($70) http://www.romow.com/ ($60) http://www.dirjournal.com/ ($160) http://www.elib.org/ ($90) http://www.wowdirectory.com/ ($43) http://www.uncoverthenet.com/ ($159) http://www.gimpsy.com/ ($49) http://www.linkopedia.com/ ($10) http://www.incrawler.com/ ($25) Of course, that's a small list of quality paid directories off the top of my head. They are some of the more well-known directories, and are a bit pricey. There are many more good paid directories...and many in the price range you were asking about ($15-$30).
Well, there is good reason why. For FREE Admission price, “quality†directories operators can afford to be selective about what they include in their Directory Index and to reject spam submissions with vengeance. 90% of rejected sites, in AMRAY case, send to junk bin by spam filters before they hit Editorial desk and then another 5% by Editors whereas Paid directories operators will allow every bit of garbage to be tossed at editors simply because they cannot afford to miss payday opportunity. My 2 c. fastreplies
There are some good paid directories out there. What you want to do is focus on your niche first...with directories that are indexed by the search engines. Then you can branch out the better value and quality general web directories.