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Following Fridays investigation into an Adwords Campaign for a friend, I got to discussing link quality this morning with Jacqui, talking about (a) how some links aren’t really links, and (b) how some bought links, simply aren’t worth buying.

We started by talking about Yellow pages and how the online search (Yell) is really quite useful. (BTW, neither of us liked the hard copy book and promptly throw it in the bin when it arrives through our doors.)

Localised online advertising

For a small local business, serving a local customer base, I think adding yourself to the Yell directory could be worthwhile, depending obviously on the cost, which I don’t know.

With Yell, the value could come (approx. £360 per year) from a paid advert with a link back to your website. Yell do use “nofollow” attributes on their links, but I still think it is worth it as it is still a direct link. More importantly, you are more likely to get enquiries from the link.

NB. I did just do a search for Graphic Design Companies in Basingstoke and the first listing was a for a company in Reading… Cross-selling across regions defeats the objective does it not?

Other paid directories

In comparison, we started talking about other directories, some paid, some free, where you can submit your website. These webmasters have got savvy selling the value of an incoming link to the advertisers website, and sell that as a bonus. The problem is, many of these directories don’t actually offer you any value of an incoming link, and here is why:

Firstly, a good incoming link needs to come from a good quality web page (or website) with good anchor text. Translated, this means:

Does the directory you have the link from have any ’status’ on the web? Google Page Rank is a very quick way of checking this, ie. Does the page your link comes from, or the website itself have a good page rank? The higher the better.

What is the anchor text used? IE. If the directory defaults with “visit the website” then this is not good. In the case of a plumber, if you had the link text as “plumber in Basingstoke”, this has more value. Even your domain name is good for the link in this instance.

Direct linking is something a lot of these directories do not do. EG. I just did a search for Basingstoke Business Directory and came up with Matren. If you look at the advert that comes up, you will see the link goes to a redirect page. This means you have NO link value from this site.

Conclusion

Many companies are trying to associate the offline way of traditional advertising online. Unfortunately, for that way of thinking, there is very little comparison.

I for one would think long and hard about any online advertising I did, and would do some research on their web directory before accepting any ‘promises’.

For further reading:

• Are Web Directories still relevant to SEO?