Paid for Directory Listings and no-follows
-
Was just about to book an advert in a directory until the salesperson told me that the directory listing would be replicated over 40 times, from different websites (they white label the directory to different sites, who then sell their own adverts in the directory).
I asked them whether they did nofollows - they didn't know what they were, so clearly not.
I'm thinking 40 plus identical links coming through (over 10% of total links to site) could attract punishment from Google. Your thoughts would be welcome.
Thanking you in advance, Luke
-
I have been in a similar situation myself and it is a judgement call - I always tend to air on the side of caution. How I look at it with a lot of the paid directories is the fact that they aren't purposefully manipulating search doesn't mean they aren't going to be hit at some point and when they are you don't really want to be associated with it in my opinion. A lot of business directories purely exist on customers paying for entry and advertising and are not therefore overly concerned with their SEO.
You could, as I have done, ask to talk to their development team/technical - you could also analyse whether they are using no follows on links and ask for examples of their white label sites. Depends how much time you want to put into it and whether you think it could be truly worth using them if you weren't endangering your SEO work..
-
Thanks for the useful feedback Matt - It sure is a tough one - they are ranked in top 3 for a specific business category, they are relevant to client, and they channel large numbers of bookings to target geographical region.
That said, booking with them could undo my SEO work, so not worth the risk. My impression is they're not being purposefully manipulative - it's just they don't get the SEO implications of what they're doing.
-
I would stay away Luke because they are:
-
Likely to be low value.
-
If they have links between their directories this is basically a link network and you don't want any part of it.
-
With link profiles being under more scrutiny than ever and spam link tactics are being monitored more thoroughly you are likely to suffer a punishment from Google because this would strike as a clear attempt at manipulation of search rankings.
The penguin will be visiting.
These are my thoughts and I wouldn't risk it if I were you - plus I definitely wouldn't pay for the privilege!!
-
-
My personal view is that directory listings don't help if they are not from very reputable and topical ones. Even if they are, their affect is very low. However, most of the paid listings are no-follow because in case Google detects link buying to affect PageRank, it penalize the buyer as well as the seller.
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
-
Any SEO disadvantages with creating pages under a directory page which doesn't exists?
Hi, Let's say we are going to create pages in the URL path www.website.com/directory/sub-pages/. In case this page www.website.com/directory/ doesn't exists or redirected; will the pages created in this URL path like stated above have any issues in-terms of SEO? We will link these pages from somewhere in the website and planning to redirect the /directory/ to homepage. Suggestions please.
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz1 -
Not showing in Google map listing. Why?
We have a client who's law firm is the highest google reviewed, on page two or three of St. Louis personal injury lawyer, but does not show in the map listing. Any ideas why this would happen or how to ensure they are viewable in the map listing?
Algorithm Updates | | David-Kley0 -
Adding the link masking directory to robots.txt?
Hey guys, Just want to know if you have any experience with this. Is it worthwhile blocking search engines from following the link masking directory.. (what i mean by this is the directory that holds the link redirectors to an affiliate site: example:
Algorithm Updates | | irdeto
mydomain.com/go/thislink goes to
amazon.com/affiliatelink I want to know if blocking the 'go' directory from getting crawled in robots.txt is a good idea or a bad idea? I am not using wordpress but rather a custom built php site where i need to manually decide on these things. i want to specifically know if this in any way violates guidelines for google. it doesn't change the custom experience because they know exactly where they will end up if they click on the link. any advice would be much appreciated.0 -
Has anyone used Capterra and will I get penalized for paid links?
Hello - I'm contemplating buying a directory listing on the software promotion website http://www.capterra.com/ . It's a site that gets quite a bit of traffic for people searching for software products and I was interested in promoting my software product there, but I don't want to ruin our very good standing with Google at this time if Google deems Capterra as selling paid links. I'm not interested in this for links but instead as a good source of referral traffic for my software site. If anyone has used Capterra or has advice on whether Capterra might injure my SERP rankings, I would appreciate it. Thanks, Jeff
Algorithm Updates | | DenverDude0070 -
Removing an old Google places listing for a newer version?
Hey there, I was wondering whether you could help me out on the following; One of our clients has a Google places listing that we created for their business but it appears to be being blocked - or at least conflicting - with an old listing. As such, Google appears to be showing the old listing with an outdated URL and company name - rather than the new one. Does anyone know how I can go about removing this listing or showing that the newer one is now more relevant? Unfortunately, I don't have the logins for the old places listing. Old listing; https://plus.google.com/105224923085379238289 New listing; https://plus.google.com/b/114641937407677713536/114641937407677713536
Algorithm Updates | | Webrevolve0 -
Organic Traffic: Hockey-stick growth followed by slow rampdown of death!
My site, Site Builder Report, was started last year. Months 1 - 6 saw modest organic traffic growth.
Algorithm Updates | | steve_benjamins
Months 6 - 9 saw explosive organic traffic growth.
Months 9 - 12 have seen a steady decrease in organic traffic. (I've attached a graph for visualizing this) The site has not changed much over this time. In fact, in the last 3 months, I've done two things to try to get organic traffic trending upwards again: Increased the amount of long-form articles on the site (from 1 new article every 3 weeks to 1 new article every week) Fixed approxately 150 five hunded (500) errors in Google Webmaster Tools three weeks ago (converted them to 404s) Neither fix has really been able to change the trend (although perhaps it's too early to tell with the fixing of errors). Does this downtrend warrant concern? It's having significant business effects- would hiring an SEO consultant be the next step for reversing this trend? Any thoughts? GeYyuvA0 -
Why am I not getting on Map Listing Results?
Greetings Mozzers, To my knowledge I'm doing everything that is "required" to start showing up on the map results when searching something local, however, we never seem to be on map results (A, B, C, D...etc). We have a Google+ page, submitted to Google Places (received PIN and entered it), optimized address to identical and in high authority map listing directories (GetListed.org), increased citations throughout the web, optimized keywords for categories on Google Places, schema.org HTML markup for address, meta address tags, consistent reviews being written by unique visitors to review sites (Yelp, Google+, etc). Am I missing a major component? Any advice would be great as I feel like I'm hitting many notes that should translate into a map result. Even for keywords that aren't incredibly difficult where we are ranking #1 above map results every time. Thanks and hope all have a great weekend!
Algorithm Updates | | MonsterWeb280 -
No-follow tags on links in the footer...do it or don't do it?
With some of the great reports SEOMoz has provided I've been able to start to take the correct steps towards fixing crawl issues, on-page issues, etc. One of my websites allows a customer to drill down to their specific state and then their city to apply for an auto loan. The SEOMoz reports told me I had too many links on these pages specifically. One of my ways to remedy this would be to add "no-follow" tags on the links in the footer as well as the links to the cities. Am I steering myself in the right/wrong direction? Should I be approaching this problem from a different perspective? Any help is greatly appreciated!
Algorithm Updates | | fergseo0