Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is it good practice to still pay for Best of the Web Directory (BOTW) and other similar one's you have to pay for?
-
I know that paid for links are hit by Google, but in the past these directories were okay. What about now?
Thank you.
-
"If you pay for a directory link only to gain position in the SERPs you will most probably not get any ROI"
Meaning if you are on the first page there won`t be ROI? I dont think so!
-
There are exceptions to the "paid for" link rule and I believe this site is one of them as they qualify there links! However whether you'll get ROI from it is another question!
-
Hi,
Well in general I agree with Arjan, I am strongly of the opinion that some directories are still VERY worthwhile, and BOTW is one of them. When you are launching a brand new site, you just aren't going to have a lot of attention and inbound lin opportunities at first. Submitting your site to DMOZ (which is free), Yahoo.dir (Paid), Business.com (Paid), JoeAnt.com (Paid) and yes, BOTW (Paid) are all most definitely worthwhile. IMHO they send a signal to the search engines that you are a legitimate business. That's a very important message to send when you are a startup.
In addition to those I think there are some others that are worth it as well, depending on your particular business, particularly localized directories and directories targeting certain niche markets.
Hope that's helpful!
Dana
-
My advice will be to only pay for directory links that drive enough traffic to your website directly to get a proper ROI.
If you pay for a directory link only to gain position in the SERPs you will most probably not get any ROI.
If you get the link from a directory Google does not like because it is known to be selling links it could even hurt your rankings.In short: Paid directory links are not good for SEO.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Topic Cluster: URL Best Practices
I'm trying to be mature and employ the Topic Cluster strategy to my content. In doing so I realized there are a few URL options. Some more difficult to execute than others. -Is it important to call out the Pillar Topic in your subtopic URL?
Technical SEO | | dkellyagile
-Does the Pillar Topic need to have its own landing page? (As opposed to just being part of the blog.) Here's an Example: My Pillar is: Inbound vs. Outbound
My subtopic is: Marketing Platforms Here are the URL options I can think of... Option 1: https://pipelineinbound.com/blog/inbound-vs-outbound-marketing-platforms/ Option 2: https://pipelineinbound.com/blog/which-marketing-platforms/ Option 3: https://pipelineinbound.com/blog/marketing-platforms-inbound-vs-outbound/ Option 4 (Hardest): https://pipelineinbound.com/inbound-vs-outbound/marketing-platforms/ Are there some fundamental best practices for URL structure and Link Building as it pertains to Topic Clusters? Thanks!0 -
Best practice for URL - Language/country
Hi, We are planning on having our website localized into more languages. We already have an English and German version. The German version is currently a sub-domain: www.example.com --> English version de.example.com --> German version Is this recommended? Or is it always better to have URLs with language prefixes such a: www.example.com/de www.example.com/es Which is a better practice in terms of SEO?
Technical SEO | | Kilgray1 -
Good alternatives to Xenu's Link Sleuth and AuditMyPc.com Sitemap Generator
I am working on scraping title tags from websites with 1-5 million pages. Xenu's Link Sleuth seems to be the best option for this, at this point. Sitemap Generator from AuditMyPc.com seems to be working too, but it starts handing up, when a sitemap file, the tools is working on,becomes too large. So basically, the second one looks like it wont be good for websites of this size. I know that Scrapebox can scrape title tags from list of url, but this is not needed, since this comes with both of the above mentioned tools. I know about DeepCrawl.com also, but this one is paid, and it would be very expensive with this amount of pages and websites too (5 million ulrs is $1750 per month, I could get a better deal on multiple websites, but this obvioulsy does not make sense to me, it needs to be free, more or less). Seo Spider from Screaming Frog is not good for large websites. So, in general, what is the best way to work on something like this, also time efficient. Are there any other options for this? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | blrs120 -
Disallow: /404/ - Best Practice?
Hello Moz Community, My developer has added this to my robots.txt file: Disallow: /404/ Is this considered good practice in the world of SEO? Would you do it with your clients? I feel he has great development knowledge but isn't too well versed in SEO. Thank you in advanced, Nico.
Technical SEO | | niconico1011 -
How to Remove /feed URLs from Google's Index
Hey everyone, I have an issue with RSS /feed URLs being indexed by Google for some of our Wordpress sites. Have a look at this Google query, and click to show omitted search results. You'll see we have 500+ /feed URLs indexed by Google, for our many category pages/etc. Here is one of the example URLs: http://www.howdesign.com/design-creativity/fonts-typography/letterforms/attachment/gilhelveticatrade/feed/. Based on this content/code of the XML page, it looks like Wordpress is generating these: <generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.2</generator> Any idea how to get them out of Google's index without 301 redirecting them? We need the Wordpress-generated RSS feeds to work for various uses. My first two thoughts are trying to work with our Development team to see if we can get a "noindex" meta robots tag on the pages, by they are dynamically-generated pages...so I'm not sure if that will be possible. Or, perhaps we can add a "feed" paramater to GWT "URL Parameters" section...but I don't want to limit Google from crawling these again...I figure I need Google to crawl them and see some code that says to get the pages out of their index...and THEN not crawl the pages anymore. I don't think the "Remove URL" feature in GWT will work, since that tool only removes URLs from the search results, not the actual Google index. FWIW, this site is using the Yoast plugin. We set every page type to "noindex" except for the homepage, Posts, Pages and Categories. We have other sites on Yoast that do not have any /feed URLs indexed by Google at all. Side note, the /robots.txt file was previously blocking crawling of the /feed URLs on this site, which is why you'll see that note in the Google SERPs when you click on the query link given in the first paragraph.
Technical SEO | | M_D_Golden_Peak0 -
Best way to handle pages with iframes that I don't want indexed? Noindex in the header?
I am doing a bit of SEO work for a friend, and the situation is the following: The site is a place to discuss articles on the web. When clicking on a link that has been posted, it sends the user to a URL on the main site that is URL.com/article/view. This page has a large iframe that contains the article itself, and a small bar at the top containing the article with various links to get back to the original site. I'd like to make sure that the comment pages (URL.com/article) are indexed instead of all of the URL.com/article/view pages, which won't really do much for SEO. However, all of these pages are indexed. What would be the best approach to make sure the iframe pages aren't indexed? My intuition is to just have a "noindex" in the header of those pages, and just make sure that the conversation pages themselves are properly linked throughout the site, so that they get indexed properly. Does this seem right? Thanks for the help...
Technical SEO | | jim_shook0 -
Blocking URL's with specific parameters from Googlebot
Hi, I've discovered that Googlebot's are voting on products listed on our website and as a result are creating negative ratings by placing votes from 1 to 5 for every product. The voting function is handled using Javascript, as shown below, and the script prevents multiple votes so most products end up with a vote of 1, which translates to "poor". How do I go about using robots.txt to block a URL with specific parameters only? I'm worried that I might end up blocking the whole product listing, which would result in de-listing from Google and the loss of many highly ranked pages. DON'T want to block: http://www.mysite.com/product.php?productid=1234 WANT to block: http://www.mysite.com/product.php?mode=vote&productid=1234&vote=2 Javacript button code: onclick="javascript: document.voteform.submit();" Thanks in advance for any advice given. Regards,
Technical SEO | | aethereal
Asim0 -
Should we use Google's crawl delay setting?
We’ve been noticing a huge uptick in Google’s spidering lately, and along with it a notable worsening of render times. Yesterday, for example, Google spidered our site at a rate of 30:1 (google spider vs. organic traffic.) So in other words, for every organic page request, Google hits the site 30 times. Our render times have lengthened to an avg. of 2 seconds (and up to 2.5 seconds). Before this renewed interest Google has taken in us we were seeing closer to one second average render times, and often half of that. A year ago, the ratio of Spider to Organic was between 6:1 and 10:1. Is requesting a crawl-delay from Googlebot a viable option? Our goal would be only to reduce Googlebot traffic, and hopefully improve render times and organic traffic. Thanks, Trisha
Technical SEO | | lzhao0