Bid Directories - Recipe for success or disaster?
-
Hi There SEO Elite,
One of my competitors has recently gone from page 3 to well above me on page 1 on our moderately high competitive keyword. Their site has 20 pages and ours is a combined e-commerce / niche information site with 1000 pages+ of which 40 are purely informational written by us,300 PDF brochures and 550+products with mostly hand written descriptions.
On looking at the competitor's links in Open Site explorer, they had huge numbers of inbound links from bid directories with many using anchor text of the keyword, and usually $2 bids. Many of the bid directories are 'linked' as they all have an almost identical template and menu etc. But these are all giving the top PA and DAs on their report. Their DA, PA and LRD is also marginally less than ours? Our total links is 26,000 theirs is 100?
Shouldn't penguin be burying them for these low quality paid links? Or is it just not been gotten around to yet?
They seem to be sailing high on $500 worth of Bid Directory links.
To follow or stay away?.....that is the question
Also, other competitors have Yahoo directory listings. These are $300. Is Yahoo directory entry worth it for our SEO with Google being 80-85% of my inbound search traffic?
Thanks for your advice
-
I can't decide about Yahoo. I've tried to spot patters in ranking change when we've added or expired a listing, but have never been able to see anything conclusive. It's also an absolutely textbook paid link (it's not like it sends traffic),.
You say it yourself; "Forget about Yahoo search, it pushes authority and trust to all SE's" - therefore we're doing it just to manipulate rankings. I can't believe Matt Cutts (or anyone else in search quality) has never asked the question "Should we allow Yahoo listings to pass authority - they're just paid links?". It does have manual review in it's favour, but otherwise it is hard to justify.
Might be interesting to run an experiment where someone tries to alter a site's position using only well known, manually reviewed directories.
-
We paid for Yahoo and I am a firm believer in the trust and authority it offers, there aren't many PR8 sites that you can pay to be a part of and not get penalized by Google for it. Forget about Yahoo search, it pushes authority and trust to all SE's, Google in our case.
-
Those directories may well be helping. However just because they appear on OSE doesn't mean that Google give a fig about them. What we do know for sure is that Google are on a rampage against low quality link building and paid links. Those links sound like a pretty clear definition of both.
If you followed suit they may or may not help in the short term. They could also bring a penalty. Don't assume that because 1 site hasn't been penalised anyone is safe. Something that might tip the balance for one site might not for another than has other things in it's favour.
You also need to consider what might happen in the next update. We know that this is the sort of thing that Google are out to stop, so the very best outcome is that you close the gap, but increase you chance of a penalty.
You have to decide for yourself where the risk/benefit line is for you. However don't be tempted by short term frustrations as you can do things quite easily that have a long term effect.
I'd start by assuming those directories are not helping, then see where else they might be getting an advantage. If it really looks like it is those directories use that as a guide to how much authority and anchor weight you might need then start with less risky sources.
Re Yahoo : Honestly I've not been able to measure any gain from it for a long time. Certainly not direct! However $300 isn't much if there is some trust benefit from that.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Where can I find either web directories or decent sites that will link back to me...without paying thru the nose?
Hi Community! For starters, from my question, you can probably determine that I am either a novice, or very low intermediate SEO person. We all know, links are king with our friends at Google. I am a recently-retired IT person with a very small freelance IT company (just me), and I'd like to generate more leads/business. I'd be thrilled with one or two small jobs per week to supplement my pension. I've used the MOZ tools only to determine the majority of my competitors have like a thousand links, whereas Google reports me as having 97 links. My on-page grades are all upper 90s and a couple are at 100%. I am not targeting really competitive keywords, so that's not my problem. My problem is my DA, which is sitting at a mere 20...pause to laugh! I don't want to pay thru the nose for high DA links for the obvious reasons. I submitted my URLs to as many directories as I could find. Would anyone have a decent list of sites where I could submit my URL to get some more links? Thanks guys and Gals! Willy
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NewSEOguy0 -
Competitors in directories according to OSE, should I submit for the same?
Hey Mozers! I have just began my link building process, firstly creating unique and quality content and looking at my competitors. I have found that much of my competitors are in listed in many directories. Some are paid and some are not. I noticed the paid ones had higher DA which seems appealing, however I'm stuck to think wether or not it is relevant to my site and if my audience will go there to search my services. But then I'm thinking well if my competitors are there then why is it so? etc Does anyone know if this is something I should look at? My site has been live since november last year and we only have 1 backlink at the moment according to moz...We are on the writing wagon to filter our content and make sure were writing good engaging content however I'm seeing this obviously not the only way. I have also read the beginners guide to backlinks via moz and researched and read other interesting ways, including blogger outreach within my niche. Any advice around this approach?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Real Vs. Virtual Directory Question
Hi everyone. Thanks in advance for the assistance. We are reformatting the URL structure of our very content rich website (thousands of pages) into a cleaner stovepipe model. So our pages will have a URL structure something like http://oursite.com/topic-name/category-name/subcategory-name/title.html etc. My question is… is there any additional benefit to having the path /topic-name/category-name/subcategory-name/title.html literally exist on our server as a real directory? Our plan was to just use HTACCESS to point that URL to a single script that parses the URL structure and makes the page appropriately. Do search engine spiders know the difference between these two models and prefer one over the other? From our standpoint, managing a single HTACCESS file and a handful of page building scripts would be infinitely easier than a huge, complicated directory structure of real files. And while this makes sense to us, the HTACCESS model wouldn't be considered some kind of black hat scheme, would it? Thank you again for the help and looking forward to your thoughts!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ClayPotCreative0 -
I am tempted to purchase a listing on an industry specific website directory with high domain authority. Will that be frowned upon as buying links?
I am tempted to purchase a listing on an industry specific website directory (http://marketingresourcedirectory.ama.org/) with high domain authority. Will that be frowned upon as buying links?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | SearchParty0 -
Are Directories Still of Any Value?
I know directories are an out-dated way to gain backlinks but the more I look into competitors that rank high link porfolio - many of thier top links come from paid directories. Granted, these can be old links but they still maintain highest authority, etc. Do you guys find directories still valuable as a linking building strategy?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PaulDylan2 -
Link directories question
Looking over a clients site and they have a bunch of link directory links that seem very skeptical to me, but the mozrank and authority seem to be ok on the home page. One directory is addlinkzfree and they have the same template and layout as a few other directories this client has. Link page has no juice whatsover, but home page has PA 54, MR 5.04 and root domain is DA 45. At first glance this would appear to be respectable numbers right? But the title of the directory and multitude of links lead me to think its nothing but a link farm. Should I advise the client to run and try to remove links from these type sites even though home page has decent scores? Im of the mindset that anything diredctory with links, free, partners etc in title need be avoided. Would appreciate any backup on this or am I just being paranoid?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | anthonytjm0 -
Using an auto directory submission
Has anyone used easysubmits.com and what's your experience with it? Any other directory submission or link building tools that help automate and manage the process like easysubmits.com says they can do? I'm just looking at it currenlty and wanted to hear others thoughts before I get taken in by some black hat method that hurts my websites instead.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Twinbytes0 -
Is a directory like this white hat? Useful?
This is one of my competitor's backlinks: http://bit.ly/mMPhmn Prices for inclusion on this page go from $50 for 6 months to $300 for a permanent listing. Do most of you guys do paid directories like this for your SEO Clients? My gut is telling me to run away...but I don't want to miss a good opportunity if I should be taking it.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarieHaynes0