6 replies to this topic

[AffDad]

Has anyone found the Business.com directory to be of value from an SEO standpoint? I've noticed the links are "dofollow" and in some cases the directory pages have a fairly good pagerank (like PR5). Seems like it could provide some good juice, but I'm wondering if anyone has noticed any sort of benefit from it?

[qwerty]

I don't think I've submitted a site to that directory in four or five years. Is it still $300 a year for a listing, or have they raised the price even further?

Frankly, I don't see a lot of point in submitting to general directories these days. A niche directory, especially if it's free, is another story.

[AffDad]

Is it still $300 a year for a listing, or have they raised the price even further?

Still $300, recurring annual fee just like Yahoo. Pretty steep. I'd guess the traffic to be more targeted than Yahoo directory, but unless there is also an reasonable seo benefit, seems the money can be better spent elsewhere.

[Jill]

Last I looked they were in fact using nofollow on the links.

[qwerty]

I just checked. They're nofollow.

And you have to scroll down quite a bit just to get to the listings. The page on Internet Consultants (4/10 TBPR, for what it's worth) starts with a box of sponsored links, then an article about Internet Consultants, which includes a few contextual links (I don't know whether those are paid placements or not, but they're nofollow as well), then more sponsored links, links to related articles, and finally, under a "More Internet Consultants Vendors" heading we get the first ten in an alphabetical list.

There are 22 "pages" of 10 listings each, but they're actually all on a single URL. The link from one set of listings to the next just hides one group and shows another, so that one page is listing some 220 entries. Even if the links weren't nofollow, there wouldn't be a lot of link juice to distribute.

[AffDad]

I just checked. They're nofollow.

Interesting. The page I checked listed at "Home » Telecommunications » Toll Free Numbers" does NOT have any nofollow tags on the directory listings. And you get two links for each listing, one is the title and the other is the url. Both those do not have any nofollow tag. That particular page also carries a PR 5. I check multiple other pages and they're all nofollow. So maybe this page slipped under the radar.

It appears their policy is nofollow on those types of links however, so you could buy a listing and they could update the links to nofollow the next day.

[qwerty]

It seems that there are two kinds of directory listings. If you go to Finance » Retirement Consultants, you'll find that under the first set of sponsored links, there's a section with the heading "Directory Listings". Those are regular links without rel="nofollow" on them.

Scroll down further, past the article and the second set of sponsored links, and you'll reach a section labeled "More Retirement Consultants Vendors". Those links are nofollowed.

Both sections feature an identical button displaying the words "List Your Business Here," and they both go to the same page, so I have no idea what one does to get a followable link. I don't see anything on the sign up page like a check box labeled "Please Make My Link Actually Count".