For SEO & Traffic - Are Sites Like These Useful

[SemAdvance]

I wanted to get others views, on the use of paid directories, and featured listings withing them as well.

Here are a few to use as examples that have been around for some time, and hold high PageRank, based on outdated toolbar export.

http://www.joeant.com/

http://ezilon.com/

http://www.dirbull.com/

Do they help with your SEO efforts if you use them?

Do they help with increased traffic to your sites?

Is the traffic incremental or volume? (If you don't know the difference this thread may not be for you)

Are they a part of an integrated approach to marketing websites online?

Thank you for your help in advance!!

[williamc]

I generally put clients in joeant, the other 2 are decent but I dont use them frequently. I probably should.

[davidweb]

Dont worry about anything else. Submit your website to websites you like. Atleast you are getting 3 decent links which will help your website in future.

A Directory/website showing PR of 0 or 1 might actually be ranking on top of Yahoo/Bing. Therefore, you can easily submit as long as website is not a link-farm, SPAM, or any other.

[SemAdvance]

There are a few of these I like to use and I have watched the PR remain intact for many months and for some years. The other thing I like is that when presented to a client there is little question as to why I would make the recommendation.

Seem we're a minority however......

.

[Web Res]

I struggle with the need to pay for directory listings. I would gladly pay some of these small one time listing fees, but I'm generally suspicious of their value. I certainly do not use them myself to find websites, so the only value I can see is the inbound link.

Yes, any magic bullets to get better search results wanted.

[tomcatuk]

Joeant is a pretty good directory. They do actually review sites, and inclusion is by no means garunteed. So if you do get in, you're in the company of quality sites, and this can't be a bad thing in terms of a link from them having some long term value.

Dirbull is expensive AFAIK. They don't seem too fussy about who they list, but the high price tends to keep sites that are of little value to bother submitting. An interesting method of keeping quality high, but there are some awful sites listed there.

[Kellyspa]

Joeant has been out there for a long time, however, I haven't used them, nonetheless, I think directories don't put much of value in SEO. I rely on social bookmarking more often these days for SEO benefits.

[SemAdvance]

@Tomcatuk - That is my thinking, human edited will weed out chaffe which to the search engines would be a better quality directory than the free ones and they could for the most part crawl safely without fear of running into spam.

@ Kellyspa - Social bookmarking value is dependent on keyword phrase,

- non competitive keyword phrases bookmarking can help,

- revenue generating keywords, bookmarking barely makes a blip.

Again the SEs will look at where they have the biggest exposure to spamming, and assign the bigger exposures a lower value in the scoring of SERPs, compared to higher quality citations.

Quality SEO is not focusing on one tactic..... but using as many tactics as possible... to cement positions, and keep the competition several spots lower in the SERPs.

[melodydaycare]

obiously site having a high pr eill boost your site rank but at the same time you need to see the dofollow attribute

[williamc]

obiously site having a high pr eill boost your site rank

No it won't necessarily.

you need to see the dofollow attribute

There is no such thing as a dofollow atribute.