$50 USD for Directory Submission Expensive ?
Open topic | January 1st, 2008 | 3 CommentsSEO Optimization recommends you reading SEO Book, 331 pages ebook in PDF with useful search engine optimization tips and search engine marketing guide.
Web directories have been source N#1 for SEO experts, freelancers and wannebe’s for a long time. The nature of submitting your website with the proper anchor text (if available) into directories for free or for a small one time fee and without the need to linkback to the directory is what made seo’s love directories and use them for optimizing their or their customers website from the off-site optimization point.
Having your site listed on a web directory which has a homepage PR6 makes you believe that the directory is well trusted from Google and that it is worth listing your site there. The higher the homepage Page Rank is the more likely that directory will have a decent PageRank on their category. But what happens when the directory loses PageRank? Is than too expensive to invest $50 (one time fee) to get listed in a directory with PageRank 3 ?
This question if $50 USD one time fee is or is not expensive raises from the fact that I have seen a drastic decrease in referrals from V7N Directory. This directory has been a great resource for this blog and has provided a good income which supported major part of the experiments I have been running. But since Google hit on directories the conversion with V7n Directory slowed down even tho this directory was only penalized on PageRank while on SERPs it has not been penalized at all.
I do have a website listed on this same directory and I have to admit that I have never been sorry that I invested the $50 even tho at the time the PageRank of the category where I submitted my site was PR3 (i think if not PR4) and now it is PR0. The fact is that Google does still give weight to this directory it has only halted the directory from passing PR juice to other sites, but it can’t stop the traffic that this directory is sending to my site and healthy the traffic is.
Thank you for reading SEO optimization blog and I hope you will be kind enough to answer the poll question to give us all a better view of how do you consider $50 one time investment on submission of your site in a PR3 homepage directory. If you like to follow up this blog with the new posts subscribe to my RSS feed by email to get notified whenever there is a new post published on this blog.
$50 is a lot if you have other ways of accomplishing the same results for no money. If a person has the cash, and it’s a good directory, go for it. If not, there are other ways.
Astrit – I didn’t vote – you know how I feel about directories. Even some of the better ones. Just look at DMOZ and all the allegations of corruption.
Hi Sam, you are right, with $50 can be done so much as well as one can accomplish the same results without investing any money at all.
Hi Catherine, Yeah I know how you stand on directories 😉 the results so far as going 50%-50% between yes and no.
This kinda tells me for some $50 is not a bad investment at all, honestly for me, the investment I made listing my site on that directory was not a waste of time or money at all, actually the conversion covered the investment and I made profit (as I published on my second stage experiment).
As for SEO perspective the site had a bounce on search engine rankings, but nothing huge as what I could have done with $50 but the conversion and profit turned out really good (which I have to admit, thats what we do seo for, no? profit!).
I’d like to keep this poll open for awhile to gather some more data and will publish the results and my opinion on a new post, so keep your votes if you want to say yours.