With Google (Supposedly) now on the war path of ‘Paid Links’ I got thinking about directories and the effect this may have.

Having looked deeper and reading up in ‘Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO’ url: www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/ I came across some questions/ answers about directories and on reporting paid sites and what sites in particular Google is interested in.

Anybody interested in more I’d suggest going to the url above, once open click EDIT…FIND ON THIS PAGE…then enter DIRECTORIES followed by NEXT.

Below is a small sample of questiong concerning reporting/ acting on paid links in directories. Please feel free to add your comments here.

Q: Are you interested in hearing about directories in this report?
A: Nope, I’d be most interested in feedback like the examples that I mentioned above, or things like paid posts that might affect search engines. If you’re still unsure what sort of reports we’d like to get, that’s okay. Fortunately, the vast majority of people sending in reports are on the same wavelength and are sending in solid feedback like the examples above.
Q: Hey, as long as we’re talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?
A: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.
Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask “Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?” you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.

One question on Matt Cuuts blog was:

I have submitted my site to a few paid directories am I gonna get banned coz of that
Answer from Matt Cutts:

There’s absolutely no problem with selling links for traffic (as opposed to PageRank). At http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/hidden-links/ I mention a couple ways to sell links that Google would have no problem with.

Your thoughts please........