I'd like to get some opinions about a situation I have regarding subscriptions to directories. I recently had to change my paypal account due to security reasons and had to change the method of payment as well. In the process, I realized I had almost 200 subscriptions to directories, a year or two old, that I can either keep or cancel. Actually, half of them were immediately canceled (all around late January) due to the account change while the other half are still active under an old payment option until I change it. It's been two full weeks since the cancellation of half those directory submissions and my rankings haven't really changed. I'm trying to save as much money as possible right now, and I'm not sure if I should keep the rest of the subscriptions or just cancel them as well. Many of them, while indexed, do not have PR and checking my backlinks with Site Explorer (not counting my domain), the site I'm working on has over 20,000 inlinks due to a lot of cross-linking of other sites that belong to the main site. I don't know if it's worth the money to keep about 100 of these subscriptions. I'll have to comb through them to see which one's might be worth it, but I'm wondering if I should just let most of them all go? One of these subscriptions I noticed was from Best of the Web. The subscription shows $79.95/yr, but on their site it's now $99/yr. Thanks for any insight into this matter.
My suggestion would be to take the time to evaluate each of them (I know that will take a while) A perfect example is what you actually gave. You have a grandfathered listing and subscription and what could be considered a discount. Go through them or else you might be kicking yourself in the butt later on
It looks like you need to examine your logs. Figure out who is referring you direct traffic, and how much, and use that as the basis of your decision to keep or cancel your subscriptions.
Just re-evaluate each directory like you initially did when you submitted. Is your link cached? Detail page cached? Directory still being promoted? Or does it even exist?
Wow, 200 subscriptions that you were not tracking at all? What rationale did you use to cancel the 100? Why did you drop them and not the others? As the others have said, they only thing you can do is to review each directory. I would also add the suggestion to review the directory, particularly the category your listing(s) reside in to ensure that the directory owner is keeping the categories on topic.