Over the past few years, I have witnessed a few paid directories that were very successful at one time, but failed in the end. The only one survived is botw.org, AFAIK. Their promotions are very interesting, they used different strategies but basically was getting high PRs and tried not to make Google unhappy at the same time.
- Stage 1: Rent links from a couple of authority websites. This was good enough to get a high PR in the earlier days.
- Stage 2: Rent massive links from a huge amount of websites.
- Stage 3: Rent massive links, also build content to make the directory ‘useful’.
So, why botw.org wasn’t hammered by Google, I think there are three reasons:
- It’s older.
- It rents links for internal categories, not putting PR in the first propriety, or at least looked this way.
- They charge pretty expensive submission fee, as a result, the listed websites are better in quality. And more importantly, not so many additions over a short period of time.
I have been running my own directories for over three years, I don’t do extensive link building, also quite few links submission. Gradually, they get good rankings on Google, for example, my personal finance directory is on the first page, as well as other two general directories nice web directory and appropriate web directory.
So, how do we evaluate a directory? Is it worth the submission fee? I would check its history and ranking. Is it over two years old? Is it on the first spot if we search its name? If it can’t rank well for its own name, we can be sure it won’t bring us any results. PageRank is the third factor, IMHO.