Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

First, the pagerank of https://www.atlantabusinesslist.com is currently 1, which is quite low, and won't really help your business. It's possible that some of the other cities rank higher (SF ranks zero). Therefore, having a lot of links from low-ranking sites won't help your business.

Looking at the site, it appears if you create an account, your listing information is saved, so it's very quick to add your second listing.

The best strategy is to identify higher pageranked sites, and attempt to get links from them. For example, your client's membership in organizations might lead to listings on those membership's websites.

If you're doing this to improve your search rankings, I would not waste my time with this directory. There are so many listings that your entry is severely diluted, and as Jay said, the site's PR is so low that it's not worth chasing.

If you're hoping that people will just come to you because of the site, I would not hang my hat on that, either. It's pretty obvious that this site was designed to do one thing, and that's sell clicks via the paid advertisements.

Of course, it doesn't cost anything but your time, so if you have a lot of that, it probably won't hurt you to get these listing.

I'm not aware of any bot that will help automate this process, but you can easily enough do a cut and paste job and get each city done very quickly.

While receiving a link from a high PR site may be beneficial, it is not "natural" to receive links only, for sake of the example, from say, PR 3 sites or better. Having some PR 1 sites, PR2, PR3, etc is common (therefore natural). So, I wouldn't generally let the PR chase you off.

Quite often when you're submitting to directories the page you are ending up on may not have PR or may not even be cached. But, if the site has decent PR then you will eventually obtain more power from it over time.

If the directory you are referring to is new, it may represent a great opportunity to sign up and be on one of the first pages in your category. As the site comes up in PR and rankings it will pull you up with it. Get in early.

The problem with the site you are referencing however is that it has a PR of 1 on the home page but no PR on sub pages. The pages aren't even cached in Google. Not good. If the site is brand new (I didn't check) then that could change rapidly and you've invested, to use financial terms, early and made a score. It could also indicate that Google does not like the site.

PR can be misleading. What Google uses is the current PR, what we see is old data (by 3 months or more). So the site could actually have higher PR than we're seeing. Keep that in mind when making a decision.

The major concern I have is that the link to your site is a rel="no follow" (view the page source to observe this). This means that Google will not, providing they observe the command, pass any value of the link to your site regardless of the PR or authority the directory may posses.

My assumption is, again without having observed the site's policies, that the link becomes valuable only if you upgrade your service to "paid" (if you pay, they'll remove the rel="no follow"). I'd verify this prior to paying for an upgrade however.

Finally, to determine the value of a directory listing you need to adjust your expectations of the directory based upon the answers of a few questions:

1. Do I desire to obtain link juice from this directory or
2. Do I desire direct traffic from this directory or
3. Do I desire both.

If the directory can't pass link juice then it could provide direct traffic. The directory could pass link juice but no direct traffic (the majority of traffic is driven by search, not directories).

So, if you can't get both then will you be satisfied with one or the other?

Obviously the ideal situation is when the link is on a high PR page, passes "SEO value" or "link juice" and passes direct traffic.

I hope this helps.

Regards,

Greg Hill
Trinity Search Engine Marketing

Great input.

I understand Jay and Inbox responses. However, I can also assume that every directory started at 0 in PR. I think their strategy would be to only list with high pr directories. Unfortunately, most of those are paid, and this directory is offering everything free. I actually contacted the company and they said that is how they're making the directory more attractive for businesses.

Greg, thank you for addressing the PR issue. The site appears to be brand new...I've been trying to add listings a little at a time over the past 6 months and this one just recently popped up. Since I started in atlanta, I checked and the atlantabusinesslist.com is indexed for about 7,600 pages on Google. I'm assuming that means the company started in Atlanta or they've added significant listings there.

You also nailed my objectives: to add links power and get some direct traffic. Of course, I've already listed with more vertical, well-targeted type directories, and even paid for "upgraded" listings where PR was very attractive.

I've spent some time for other clients in this initiative, and I have noticed that PR has changed somewhat drastically for some directories over time and not for others. But, I don't see how I can/should avoid this.