Pyramid Scheme on Bid Directories?

You may be right, an0n.
I guess also for the average link purchaser, paying $10 (or some smaller amount) on any kind of directory is less risky in the case you are dealing with an unethical owner, but when you start getting into the hundreds of dollars, you want to know more about the person your are giving the money. Obviously, we see so far that there have been some successes with larger amounts, but I think some time will need to pass, and people will start to make more solid judgements about this model.

 

We will see what happens in a couple of months. People will see more and more benefits from their listings then. The traffic and pagestrength will go up on many of the new bidding directories and we will see which ones are going to survive. I doubt that the ones where a webmaster needs to resort to listing his own sites as if they were bids from someone else, will go very far. Like in so many cases, the bad ones will sort themselves out.

 

one of the weakness I see in phplinkbid script is you can modify the bid from admin panel. To avoid this problem, I think the developer should disable this.

 

To be honest I don't understand why paid directories think they have a better reputation ...

My strategy has been to buy top level regular links with high PR, or feature links if they are displayed over several pages. Simple but effective.

In the last couple of weeks I have had at least 5 different, well meaning directory owners, move my links to some backwater page with no PR, or no sub-pages. "Restructuring" I am told.

In most cases I would not have purchased the links given the new structure!

Where my link was on 20 pages, now it is only shown on 5-6 pages. Page rank is non-existant and in most cases the pages are further from the home page -- read lower ranked in future updates.

Give me a Bid for Position directory any day! At least the placement is under my control, and my link won't be moved arbitrarily.

EDIT: Make that 6 directories ... found another one this morning.

 

I'm going to chime in on this whole meme of swapping bids.

When I started my three bid directories (and I have more to come), I was wondering how I'd effectively reciprocate each site to the other. I figured I owned them, so I had the right to make the bids as high as possible since they were my sites...and technically I have that right. But ethically, I'm not as sure now.

My first site was WebDNABusiness.com. My second was LifeTimeTextlink.com. By that time my first site was getting a little popular and so to promote the second I decided to make a bid that would become the first position ($24 if I recall correctly). I only had a handful of bidders at that time and that was the decision I came up with. At that point I decided that I wouldn't ever bid the site up any more, no matter how far it fell, as the only reason it got the bid in the first place was for the initial exposure. I've had several bids come in since and not once have I been tempted to change it. That was the decision I made at the time.

My third site, MeatyLink.com, I decided to bid the top amount on the page for the letter "M" for both sites. This was a lot less than a top position on the home page, but would still give me some initial exposure for the domain. Again, once the bid was made, I wasn't going to change it.

Now, keep in mind. I was still figuring things out.

MeatyLink.com isn't officially launched yet. So it's just marinating (pun intended). But I did want it to get aged in the search engines.

I have two more sites to launch alongside MeatyLink, and another 10 being planned on. I want to keep things as ethical as possible so I thought long and hard about how I'm going to reciprocate the sites. Here's what I came up with so far:

1) A reciprocal bid is allowed, but will always be the minimum of $1 from now on. Nothing more.
2) I'll be creating a separate "Network Sites" page for each site and will have a listing of most of the bid sites I maintain (I'll keep some secret though).
3) Footer links would be appropriate for 3 or 4 sites that are my moneymakers or ones that I'm promoting.

Ok, there's my two cents on the subject since this is something I have come into recently.

 

Hi Guys, really great discussion. I really feel strongly that the pyramid structure really shows the cheating & in the end no one is earning.

 

Its all about integrity and ethics of the owners themselves. The rule thread is a great place to read about the do's and don'ts for bid directories. If someone does it blatantly with the method you mentioned, I believe the experienced bid owners can tell by doing a quick research.

Owners exchanging bids among each other is one thing... but I'm more concerned about those owners who owns several bid directories and listing them all highly among all of them.

 

I own 3 directories and i put my links in the footer or place a minimum bid.I dont think it is correct to put a high price on your own directory.