In the last couple of days of surfing around, I’ve been doing some research into paid directories as I plan to write a series of articles about the key directories you should list your gite in. There’s a variety of advice out there about which sites you should list in, how many sites you should list in, and the benefits of listing in a directory in the first place.
To be clear, there are two main reasons to list your web site in a paid for directory:
1. Exposure. If you list your rentals directory which has lots of visitors who are looking to rent your type of property, then you’re likely to increase the number of punters your gite gets in front of. There are obviously a few provisos to that statement and in future articles I’ll cover what you should check for before handing over your gite marketing budget.
2. Pagerank. In one of my articles on SEO, I talk about the importance of ‘important’ sites linking to your web site and the ‘pagerank’ mechanism that Google uses to allocate ‘importance’. The simple principal is that links from high page rank web sites to yours will improve your own page rank and therefore ensure you appear higher in search results for specific search terms.
Matt Cutts is pretty high up at Google. here he discusses paid links and Google’s view on and approach to it. This is important because many people believe that Google penalises for paid links, on the basis that paying for a link ‘cheats’ the system of a link showing a search engine that a page is ‘important’.
The main takeaway from Matt’s article is this paragraph:
“A natural question is: what is Google’s current approach to link buying? Of course our link-weighting algorithms are the first line of defense, but it’s difficult to catch every problem case in adversarial information retrieval, so we also look for problems and leaks in different semi-automatic ways. Reputable sites that sell links won’t have their search engine rankings or PageRank penalized–a search for [daily cal] would still return dailycal.org. However, link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext)”.
In other words, if a directory sells you a link to your web site, they won’t get penalised for doing so if spotted by Google (ie their page rank won’t suffer) but equally, neither will YOUR page rank benefit. So this brings into question the whole SEO benefit of paying to go into a paid directory.
However, it’s my belief that currently, Google probably only penalise irrelevant paid links, and probably only have the ability to spot the most obvious paid links in link exchanges. I strongly believe that getting a paid link from a gite directory will still have a very positive impact on your page rank. If you have any experiences of this, drop me a line in the comments.
One of the articles I found suggested that the best paid directories change from one year to the next, and that you should focus your marketing spend on the directories that come out top in the search engine results for such search terms as ‘cottage rentals in france’ etc. This may or may not be a good strategy, I don’t know as i’ve not done my research yet into the directories, but when I have done, I’ll let you know.
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Paid Directories and SEO
In the last couple of days of surfing around, I’ve been doing some research into paid directories as I plan to write a series of articles about the key directories you should list your gite in. There’s a variety of advice out there about which sites you should list in, how many sites you should list in, and the benefits of listing in a directory in the first place.
To be clear, there are two main reasons to list your web site in a paid for directory:
1. Exposure. If you list your rentals directory which has lots of visitors who are looking to rent your type of property, then you’re likely to increase the number of punters your gite gets in front of. There are obviously a few provisos to that statement and in future articles I’ll cover what you should check for before handing over your gite marketing budget.
2. Pagerank. In one of my articles on SEO, I talk about the importance of ‘important’ sites linking to your web site and the ‘pagerank’ mechanism that Google uses to allocate ‘importance’. The simple principal is that links from high page rank web sites to yours will improve your own page rank and therefore ensure you appear higher in search results for specific search terms.
Then I found this: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/text-links-and-pagerank/
Matt Cutts is pretty high up at Google. here he discusses paid links and Google’s view on and approach to it. This is important because many people believe that Google penalises for paid links, on the basis that paying for a link ‘cheats’ the system of a link showing a search engine that a page is ‘important’.
The main takeaway from Matt’s article is this paragraph:
“A natural question is: what is Google’s current approach to link buying? Of course our link-weighting algorithms are the first line of defense, but it’s difficult to catch every problem case in adversarial information retrieval, so we also look for problems and leaks in different semi-automatic ways. Reputable sites that sell links won’t have their search engine rankings or PageRank penalized–a search for [daily cal] would still return dailycal.org. However, link-selling sites can lose their ability to give reputation (e.g. PageRank and anchortext)”.
In other words, if a directory sells you a link to your web site, they won’t get penalised for doing so if spotted by Google (ie their page rank won’t suffer) but equally, neither will YOUR page rank benefit. So this brings into question the whole SEO benefit of paying to go into a paid directory.
However, it’s my belief that currently, Google probably only penalise irrelevant paid links, and probably only have the ability to spot the most obvious paid links in link exchanges. I strongly believe that getting a paid link from a gite directory will still have a very positive impact on your page rank. If you have any experiences of this, drop me a line in the comments.
One of the articles I found suggested that the best paid directories change from one year to the next, and that you should focus your marketing spend on the directories that come out top in the search engine results for such search terms as ‘cottage rentals in france’ etc. This may or may not be a good strategy, I don’t know as i’ve not done my research yet into the directories, but when I have done, I’ll let you know.
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