Paid Directory Listings

To get an advantage on your competition some website owners are drawn towards a directory listing on a specialised website that is specific to the website’s niche and is an industry leading authority in their specific area, commonly Google have recognised this and rank the authority site highly for competitive terms. Unfortunately these sites are, by definition. hard to get a link on. Therefore there are a hugh amount of ‘specialised’ directory sites that want your advertising budget, not all of these are a good use of your money.
Take this recent investigation I done for a client when they asked this
[Website Client wanting to advertise] This was an ad I did last year, it was an ad I paid for, can you tell me if it has any value?
[Delicious Webdesign]  After investigating the offer here’s what we have found:
1 Currently you have 625 links from other websites to your site and there is no link from the site you have been advertising on that has been found (in the yahoo site explorer link tool)
2 Your Google Analytic Website Stats from the last 2 years shows over 1000 referrals from other places (other websites / search engines etc) and site you have been advertising on has only referred the 111^th most and has send 20 visitors to your site (12 of them were at the start of the listing, in its launch weekend) so the remaining year it got 8 click (only 45% of these were new visits ). In comparison the link on my website (portfolio page) has sent over 250 visitors to your site, other generic and directory sites have send over 500 visitors to your site, obviously some visitors are more ‘targeted and valuable’ than others but our portfolio page may be giving you people interested in your website but in general all traffic is good.
3 In trying to ‘impress’ you with stats they have given you a figure of 257 ‘hits’ that your site has got but hits as a statistic is irrelevant, as if a page has 10 images on it and is visited then that will register 10 hits.
4 Your listing on that site has now been removed but the text on it is copied / duplicated from your main site and is worthless being non-unique.
5 The actual website wanting you to advertise on it has a Google Page Rank of 2 (this is low) and your actual page has no value in terms of Google Pagerank (in Comparison your website has a homepage Google Pagerank of 3 which is good and the highest in your area thanks to our great SEO on your site 🙂 )
In summary:  If we were offered a free advert / link on that site we would probably accept but  wouldn’t pay more than £10 per year for it.