Bid for position directories seem to be the latest hot thing among directory owners. For those that haven’t heard of them they are directories where a site’s placement in the category pages depends on the amount of money that the site owner “bids”. The more they bid the higher their listing is placed. Of course site owners can bid more at any time to improve their position or even appear in the frontpage of the directory since the top bidders (usually ten) from all categories appear in the frontpage. There are two main subcategories in this new niche, the directories that categorize listings alphabetically and those that categorize listing by subject like old fashioned directories.
Let’s start with the alphabetical categorization. This method in my opinion makes useless one of the main advantages of directory software site under the enviroment category of my directory because at the time that category was PR6, enough said). In addition to that the alphabetical listings limit the total number of categories by definition which is good for directory owners but bad for submitters since it means that if a directory becomes popular listings will quickly move in page 2 or three and if they want to go back to page one they will have top engage in a bidding war. Also after a while the necessery bid to get a fresh listing in page one for a new site might be really high (it’s easier to add 5$ to your listing to move it to page one than spending 100$ to get your site listed there). In all honesty I will stay away from bid for position directories that use this kind of categorization for the same reason I staid away from tag clouds. No cocitation, or to be more exact bad cocitation, that from my experience can do more bad than good especially for extremely niche sites.
The ones that use categorization by subject are much less in numbers right now and it was one of them that started this craze, BigWebLinks that is owned by the owner of Alive Directory. These are much better in my opinion because they can offer at least some basic cocitation. Of course since they mostly have only top level categories the cocitation won’t be great either. The reason that I don’t believe that they are going to expand their categories structure is simple. The less categories the strongest the bidding wars. However, even if some people get in bidding wars at first I am not sure for how long they will participate until they say “who cares let it sink”. In addition to that I really doubt that they will attract the interest of SEO companies since they usually work with a set budget for each client and in addition to that they will have to spend time monitoring their client positions in various bidding directories and as everyone knows time is money. Generally I believe that these kind of bid for position directories will do better in the long term but I personally decided to wait a bit more before jumping on the bandwagon of buying listings (I definitely don’t plan on creating one).
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