What types of directories are seen as sources of paid links?

We have a question from Fabio Ricotta from Brazil. Fabio asks “Will Google Yahoo! Directory and BOTW as sources of paid links? If no, why is this different from other sites that sell links?”

I’ve answered this question in the past but since enough people are curious to ask, I’ll do the spiel again. Whenever we look into whether a directory is useful to users, we say, what is the value add of that directory? Do they go and find entries on their own or do they only wait for people to come to them. How much do they charge, how much is the editorial service that they are charged. If a directory takes $50 and every single person who ever apply to the directory automatically gets in for that $50. There is not as much editorial oversight as something like that yahoo directory where people do get rejected. So if there is no editorial value adds then that is much closer to the page links. In fact if you look at our webmaster quality guidelines we used to have a guideline that says, submit your site to directories and we gave few examples of directories. And what we found what’s happening was people would get obsessed with that line and finds a lot of directories and there were a lot of people who were like oh well, if people are looking out for directories, I’ll make a directory and so you saw all these fly-by night directories, that would start up and say “I am the page rank 6 directory, you give me $50 and you’ll automatically get an entry in my directory.” And it’s not as if those type of listing or the sort of things that users really value or do a lot of good in our search results so that we want to do a lot of good. So we ended up taking out that mention in our webmaster guidelines so that people don’t get obsessed with the directories and think yes, I have to go find a bunch of different directories to submit my site to. There are some directories that do carry weight; the yahoo directory does a good job of editorial discussion and actually doing a review and rejecting a significant number of entries that are low quality. So the question in your mind whenever you consider a directory is what is the value add, do they high standards? I have a blog post outright that talk about other different factors of the directory and whether we might consider it as real. But those are some of the factors that you should ask yourself about. So by those measures, no, the yahoo directory is not just automatically paid links. Typically paid links are going to be much lower quality and they are going to be much more automatic people will give you whatever rank or text you want all those sorts of things. So there is a difference. At the same time don’t go overboard worrying about submitting your site to every directory. If you make a great site make sure that the people find out about it. Those are some of the things that really makes a difference not that I have to submit my site to atleast 5 directories or atleast 10 directories or anything like that.

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