Paid Directory Listings - Worth the money and effort??

Before coming to any sort of conclusion, lets first find out why people actually go for submitting their sites to directories. As I can see, there can three major benefits out of directory submission:

• One Way "Trusted" Links (If its not reciprocal).
• Some Directories, generally with higher Page Rank, pass on their PR to the sites they are linking to. Thus, a link from such directories help you to gain higher PR.
• An occasional visitor which a site can get from directories.

Considering these 3 major reasons behind people opting for Directory Submission, then only those paid directories which have a PR of 5 and above are worth considering for Paid submission as only then one can enjoy the advantage of PR such directories pass on. Anything below 5 is not worth spending even $1, as there are many free directories of PR 4 and above which will give the same benefit as these paid directories.

If you ask me, I would prefer spending my money on Microsoft Small Business Central, sbd.bcentral.com. They got a great PR on there site and you get several links from pages with high PR. Another good paid directories I like are botw.org, which is one of the oldest Web Directories around & GoGuides.com.

dir.yahoo.com is good too – but its too expensive. I would rather suggest you use your money smartly and buy inclusion in cheaper directories with a PR 6-8. A good list of such directories can be found here : www.directorycritic.com/paid-directory-list.html

Few things you should keep in mind before selecting any of these directories:

• IP Addresses of the directories. It's very important that you have links from different IPs to get most out of them
• Page where your link will appear and number of links on that page. You shouldn't submit to those directories which list more than 100 links per page, including internal links and Ad links.
• Page Rank & Indexing Status of the page where your link will appear. If the page is not indexed by Google, then it's not worth the effort.

All in all, you should carefully consider spending your hard earned $$$ on paid directories as there are other alternatives available for the same price!
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