Many webmasters who actively seek ways to promote their websites have run across paid web directories. These are website directories that charge you a fee to have your website listed.
We aren’t talking about directories that offer express submission but websites which only accept paid submissions. We’re going to talk about some drawbacks to submitting your websites to paid directories and we’ll tell you why you should steer clear of them.
The first thing to keep in mind about many of these paid directories is that they’re designed to earn money. First and foremost this means that the webmasters want to accept the most submissions that they can because the more submissions they accept the more money they will make. This results in some very low-quality websites getting listed. If you look at this from Google’s perspective you see that this only makes the directory look like a link farm, and in Google’s eyes the links in that directory should not carry much value. If you look at this from a user’s perspective, the directory offers no real value. Why should a web surfer use a directory which lists low-quality sites?
Now you should be convinced that you won’t get real, targeted traffic to your website through most paid directories. You might still be skeptical about a listing’s impact on search engines because, after all, all these directories are advertised as high PageRank. This brings us to our second point, which is Google’s PageRank. Paid directory webmasters want to attract you to their directories and one way they do this by building up high-PageRank homepages. These directories are designed to get all that link juice to the homepage so they can trick you into thinking this is a trusted directory. Webmasters will forget that PageRank is assigned per page, and many of these directories have no PageRank showing for any pages one category deep. If you decide to buy a link in one of these directories, odds are that your listing will end up on a page which will never receive any notable link juice.
Now you see that you won’t get much real traffic or much jink juice from these paid directories. Why would you still spend money on a listing (and risk a penalty from search engines for buying links)? Most people wouldn’t and I’d like someone to comment if they have a good reason to spend money on a paid directory listing. For an end to this article, I’d like to point out one last thing about many of these directories. A lot of the paid link directories will promote themselves telling you they offer a “permanent link” for a one-time fee. How permanent is permanent? We went to page 101 in the DigitalPoint forums in the section for directory solicitations. We opened the first 5 threads for paid directories (from late 2008 to early 2009). Zero out of the five directories were still website directories. All we saw were four sites bought by others and one expired. Also, out of the five claims for PageRank (ranging from PR2 to PR5), none of these sites had any PageRank on them. But don’t trust our results, look for yourself. Pick out five older directories at random and research them. It would amaze you that two years after creation many of these website directories are no longer on the web.
If you’re looking to submit your website to a few directories, your best option is free, relevant directories. Don’t go after paid links, even if they do look more appealing. No matter which way you look at it, there is nothing better about a paid link than a free link.
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