Fri Dec 28 07:03:19 PST 2018

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I do not necessarily have the best answer for that question. If you are building a
site for temporary profits, then even most of the low-quality ones can help you
build links that will be effective for ranking in MSN or Yahoo!. The problem
comes about when some of those links that help you in less sophisticated
algorithms end up hurting your Google ranking.
From the above picture, you can see that search algorithms are reliant upon linkage
data. If you look at a site?s inbound links (I will explain how to do this later on

and find few links from quality sites, few or no related sites, and many low-quality
links, that is not a good sign for the long-term potential of the link.
When you look through the listings in your category and throughout the directory,
there should be, in general, many high-quality sites that were added for free by an
editor for each site that paid for a listing. You do not need to view the whole
directory to figure out if it is good or bad, just a few categories that you know well.
Are quality sites listed there? If mostly junk sites are listed there, then you probably
do not want to pay for a submission.
If the categories are almost all blank, then wait to see if an editor will be making it
useful. If the directory consists only of paid listings or blank pages it is probably
not worth paying to be listed. Directories with many empty categories often get
flagged by duplicate content filters for having too much similar content, since there
is little content on most of their pages beyond the directory structure.
Another thing to look out for is site-wide or home page ads to high margin sites in
areas like casino, prescription, or debt consolidation. Avoid those types of
directories as well, since they are more likely to be above radar and search engineers
would be more likely to want to discount links from those sites.
I believe TrustRank is not implemented to the point where you get large negative
scores for just a few bad links, as scraper sites virtually guarantee all top-ranked
sites gain a few bad links, but perhaps it could be used to help figure out the good
link to bad link ratio and flag high PageRank sites with low trust scores for human
review.
Niche Directories
Industry-Specific Directories

Business.com is a business directory that costs a couple hundred dollars annually to
list your site. In general, Business.com is a strong link that most businesses should
buy in on. Business.com and some other directories allow you to list multiple links
in your listing.