07-03-2006, 09:55 PM
zach Wrote:Thanks for posting it. I love the "for reference" section. I suppose that it was a list of directories. There are probably loads of them on the net. I do have a question though:
This is about PAID directories in particular: Does google penalize you if you are obviously listed in a paid directory? If you got PR from being in a paid directory, that's basically paying for links, and I THINK that goes against their Terms and Conditions.. I'm not sure. I do know that the paid link business is very very big. Is there an easy way for google to figure out whether its a natural link or a paid link?
No, to my knowledge, Google has no idea if you paid for the link or not, unless it is an obvious Paid Directory ONLY, and even then I don't know why they would care.
The thing I have heard is that TOO MANY links can hurt your ranking. In other words, if a directory site has 500 links on it, it isn't as strong as a site that has only 10 links on it. The rule of thumb is that you should not have more than 12 links on a site, for the links to be worth anything. That is why alot of these sites who sell links will say "only 4 spots left" because they are doing you a favor by limiting the links they have on their site.
The more linkbacks you have out there, the better, even from a directory site, but I really don't think those will help your PR at all.