subject: Paid Directory Considerations [print this page] There are lot of established directories that offer you as a submitter benefits but there are even more bad ones. Today on the internet directories are springing up like weeds in the garden and most of them are just that "weeds".
Ideally, the web directory listing(s) that you would want and most importantly would want to pay for should have many qualities, especially for general web directories.
directory Age - When you are paying for a directory listing you want to make sure you are going to get your money's worth and that it will last.
Therefore locating well-established directories is key.
A paid web directory should have existed as a directory for a few years. A web directory that has been around for 2 years is likely to be around for another 2 years. Every day hundreds of directories pop up and many of them will not last, the owners will not renew the domains, will use the domain for others things such as a shopping site etc. - Archive.org or a whois search of the domain can provide the domain age details.
Search engine friendly URLs - A directory should provide direct do-follow links to your website i.e. as opposed to indirect or no-follow links with a rel="nofollow" attribute. web directory listing pages should not be restricted by the robots.txt file also.
Direct SEO friendly links help to increase your websites ranking and PageRank, whereas no-follow links do not.
Human edited - Any good web directory should be actively edited by humans, you do not want to be included in a link farm especially when you are paying for a listing.
One should ensure that the websites listed are in the appropriate categories and descriptions are correct and are not spammy.
Maintenance - A good web directory should be well maintained.
directories linking to sites with errors that are not corrected over time should be avoided. This could be listings to domains that no longer exist or to domains which are parked.
Well indexed - The web directory should have hundreds of pages indexed in the major search engines especially Google, which means that the search engine has crawled the webpages and added them to its index.
Unique IP - Avoid networks of directories hosted on the same IP or the same IP class. Ideally, you will have links from a diverse list of IPs.
