The Problem With Paid Directories and High Pagerank

I thought I would write this little article warning people about some of the paid directories and how they can and are exploiting people with misleading quotes such as high pagerank, charging phenomenal fees for nothing like high pagerank backinks in return like promised or suggested.

There seems to be a pandemic of sites charging in order for a small placement link in a category which relates to the niche website in question. You in effect place your site link in the relevant category and pay a fee which can range from 5 dollars up to and including 150.00 plus, some are free.

However what they don't tell you is that each page has a pagerank, an independent internal pagerank for every page . So for instance, if you had a website with say 100 pages within the site you have 100 separate pagerank pages which can range from a scale of 1-10 depending on various factors.

Failing to check the internal pagerank of where you link is likely to be placed before may save you quite a bit of money for pretty much nothing in return.

Say for instance the web directory in question has a homepage with a pagerank of 7 which may look quite tempting at first thought, however if you cannot place your link on that actual homepage the pagerank 7 counts for nothing.

The best method to check this would be to use free software on the web and locate where in that site your link is likely to be placed and check the internal pagerank of that given page, you may find some of them have a pagerank of 0 or low pagerank.

Granted no doubt these pagerank pages may rise or not over the coming months however it doesn't take away the fact that some directories are claiming high pagerank to sell links, its misleading and should be stamped out.

I don't know about you but I would find it infuriated paying for a link in a high pagerank directory not that I would to later find out that the internal page it is place on has a pagerank of 0 or quite low. In fact it is quite likely to be low for the simple reason that most directories have a lot of categories meaning less traffic to each page which in effect lower each page and each pagerank in the directory.

You also have to take in account the sheer number of directories, this will also decrease traffic volume as more and more directories are built lowering pagerank of each page as traffic drops as more competition emerges. Either these directory owners do not understand pagerank or they are misleading people to make money.

I would also suggest that perhaps there is evidence for refunds in certain cases as it is obvious in some cases of sites exploiting pagerank directories for simple profit. There is little evidence of pagerank internal pages which have the same PR as the homepage therefore little value except for traffic depending on popularity of that category.