How much would you pay to submit to this directory?

by 21 replies
24
We have a directory on one of our authority sites which we've been providing free of charge to our industry for years. It is the biggest directory in our industry and it has several thousand listings.

The problem is that it is becoming more expensive to maintain because we manually check every submission, edit where necessary, and we periodically review all existing listings as well.

We are committed to maintaining the high quality of the directory, and while we would like it to remain free, we are seriously considering charging for submissions.

The structure of the site is like this:
  • Root page of site - www. domain .com - PR6
  • Directory Top Level - www. domain .com/directory/ PR5
  • Directory Categories - www. domain .com/directory/category/ PR4
  • Individual Directory Listings - www. domain .com/directory/category/your-listing/ PR2

In other words each listing gets a PR2 page with the only OBL on it.

Here's a look at the link profile of the site:




So my question is this: if you were in our industry, how much would you be prepared to pay to submit your listing to our directory?
#search engine optimization #directory #pay #submit
  • It depends who you're selling it to. If it is to the business itself then they'll just be interested in traffic. many won't even know about PR.

    Just for the link you could get away with $40-$50/mo on the homepage I think. It's just harder to sell unless you are dealing with their SEO.
    • [1] reply
    • This is a good point, one we're already aware of - many businesses in our industry don't understand the SEO value of directories and they focus mainly on traffic, but one segment (one category in our directory) does have this understanding, and it's them that we expect to get most of the paid submissions from.

      We don't sell links that pass PageRank - we are only considering selling directory submissions and intend to stay completely within the Google webmaster guidelines - the directory listings do pass PageRank which is acceptable to Google for manually maintained industry directories.

      So my question remains - if this was your industry, or your client's industry if you are an SEO provider - how much would you pay to submit your listing to this directory?
  • Banned
    How many sites are listed in the categories? Looks like they're buying a PR2 link, but If the PR4 category page isn't paginating the actual backlink page, it might be a better link than a usual PR2.
    • [1] reply
    • The category pages aren't paginated right now - they currently have between 500 and 2000 listing each.

      One idea we have is to turn on pagination and limit each page to somewhere between 20 to 50 listings.

      Another idea - as you suggested - is to place an OBL on the category page as well - this would obviously make the listings more valuable to people who care about both PageRank and Traffic.
  • 7-8 bucks / year at its best, depending to OBL of particular category. If many obl would pay even less than so.
    • [1] reply
    • Thanks for that - but are you referring to the PR2 links based on the current structure, or the PR4 links if we added the links to the category pages and paginated them?
  • Thanks for that - but are you referring to the PR2 links based on the current structure, or the PR4 links if we added the links to the category pages and paginated them?

    Of course you need to place them directly into PR4 category page, as well us on the details "PR2" page, otherwise you would just throw your PR away.
    • [1] reply
    • In that case are you still suggesting only $8 per year?

      This is one of the leading sites in its industry and we already have clients paying us $1,000s per year for no-follow links (they get a lot of targeted traffic - much more than the directory provides admittedly).

      We probably wouldn't bother for less than $25/year.
      • [1] reply
  • Not sure then. It might cost more in that case, but I'd love to see how it looks and know more about niche as well. I'm sure though, some clients would definitely buy it, but most would look for some cheaper options. It is your right to set up the price you want.
    • [2] replies
    • We're just in the market research phase at the moment - if we proceed we'll try to price for maximum profit rather than maximum sales, every bit of input like yours helps.

      I won't be exposing any of our sites on this forum - if you're in our industry then you most likely already know us anyway.
    • Banned

      Lol, yea we all want to know that niche.
      • [1] reply
  • How come the page with your only listing gets a PR 2 instantly.
    • [1] reply
    • Google assign PageRank pretty much as soon as they've indexed a page. They crawl through more than 10,000 pages in our directory every day.

      People often get confused about this because Google only make a snap-shot of the PR data available to the public 3 or 4 times a year - but they are calculating it every day.
      • [1] reply
  • Honestly (and unfortunately) not much, generally speaking Directories are dwindling v search engines so in reality a customer is only paying for a PR2 link.

    I try it at $15/ month and see if you can rise from there.
    • [1] reply
    • Thanks for the feedback - it's quite helpful to see the range of prices people are suggesting.

      We'll probably be offering both a PR4 and PR2 link with each listing once if we charge for submissions.
  • For metrics of that quality, I'd happily pay $100+ per year. Heck I don't even care if it's not related to my niche.

    Give us a WF special offer Crate a "miscellaneous links" sections
    • [1] reply
    • You probably weren't entirely serious - but I should point out that the reason we got those metrics is because we've remained true to our industry for 15 years - the last thing we would do is tarnish our reputation with unrelated content which our audience would consider to be spam.

      BTW - for those of you looking at the link graph above and wondering how we built those links, the answer is that we didn't - less than 100 of those links were placed by us - it all comes from content generating the links. I provided some tips on this approach in a thread last year: http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-...backlinks.html
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    How much would you pay to submit to this directory?

    We have a directory on one of our authority sites which we've been providing free of charge to our industry for years. It is the biggest directory in our industry and it has several thousand listings. The problem is that it is becoming more expensive to maintain because we manually check every submission, edit where necessary, and we periodically review all existing listings as well.