Search Engine Marketing Spot

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A recent thread over at Digital Point reveals Matt Cutts speaking openly about the Google pagerank bar and how he doesn’t expect to see it updated in the next few days or even the coming weeks. The industry was predicted a PR update in either late July or sometime in August. Here it is now in September and we have yet to see the little green bar update its “magic number”. My belief behind not seeing the update is due to the debate of paid links and what Google is trying to do to fight them. The thing about Pagerank is everyone uses the number as the standard when buying and trading links. If Google does away with the Pagerank bar, then that could put a damper in the link selling market since everyone would have to find another way to convey the quality of there website. As of now, going by the pagerank of a website was an easy way to determine if you wanted to purchase a link on that site. Google dug themselves into this hole and are struggling to get themselves back out of it. In the same article Matt talks about his take on paid directories.

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.
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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.”

So from what I read here having paid directories are perfectly fine, you just have to not accept every website that submits and pays you for a “review”. So we can buy these directory “reviews” from directories that are reputable and does not accept every submission. Isn’t that not still buying a link though? Seriously thing about that for one minute, you can submit your site to say BOTW, have it reviewed for $80 and if approved you now have your site listed. Is that not a paid link now? They do not use no follow tags or javascript links, it currently passes the link juice onto your site. Will they be forced to change this now with the paid directories and have all the links no follow, use javascripts links or some other measure to ensure that the juice is not passed onto your website? If that is the case, who in there right mind will bother to buy these directory reviews? We all know that they are not searched as nearly often as the search engines, when was the last time you went to a directory to search for something? Yea that is what I thought….NEVER! Google’s plan back fired and now they are just trying to use duct tape and patch things up until they can find a definitive answer. I believe they will be eliminated the little green bar here in the near future to help combat its use with buying text links from other websites.