In today’s times, finding a good premium directory is not as simple as it as it was just a few years back. While SEO professionals have their own preferred list of good premium directories, the normal webmaster optimizing one website may find it hard to determine which paid directory is worth the review fee. In this post are some helpful tips to help website owners decide where to spend their money.
Many people tend to believe that Pagerank is a trustworthy metric of a paid directory. This can be a completely false assumption. With the explosion of premium web directories have come a new type of business owner looking to make a buck from the link building needs of other webmasters. There are thousands of premium directories operating under a dropped domain or domain name with Pagerank that has been bought in auction. In addition to this, there are web directory operators that are spoofing Pagerank using an unsophisticated flaw that Google has yet to secure. While Pagerank can be a good indicator of the health of a directory, once must look beyond this basic metric and do some research.
The most important factor in figuring out whether submitting to a premium web directory is worth the cost is the page cache which your listing will appear on. If the page you are submitting to is not cached, then the near term usefulness of your listing may not be noticed. So how do you find out whether or not a page is cached? Using the site operator at Google, you simply type in “site:” without the quotes and enter the complete URL to the specific page where your listing will appear. Make certain you remove the http:// part in the URL otherwise your results will not be accurate.
Now that you know your listing will be on a page that is cached and frequently crawled by Google, you can dig a little deeper. Copy a sentence from a listing on the same page that your listing will appear on and return to Google and place it within quotes and perform a search. Does Google return listings that match this result other then the page you are likely to be listed on? If so, the editors at this web directory most likely are approving anything that is submitted and paid for. This is not good for the health of the web directory or for the SEO weight it will give your listing.
The age of a directory is useful as well. For example, web directory is over two years old. This directory will produce more search engine optimization benefits then a directory started a year ago. Web directories that were released under one year ago typically have not built up any trust with the search engines at all, unless they are very unique and provide very useful content. In nearly all cases, young web directories do not have a lot to offer. However, young directories that are likely to grow and age may allow submitters the opportunity to get a permanent listing for life at a greatly discounted rate. With that being considered, do not underestimate young premium web directories simply because of their age. As these premium directories grow, your lifetime listing will gain trust with the top search engines.
When it comes to premium web directory submissions, everyone has a budget. If everyone had an unlimited budget, we all could submit to every paid directory that exists. Since this is not true, it is important to perform some research first to be sure that your advertising dollars are spent in such a way that results are achieved.
