We have a question from San Francisco, California, today blindfive year old wants to know why are paid directories not held to the same standards as paid links.
I really enjoy that question because I disagree with the assumption because I believe in many cases or in substantially all cases, paid directories are held to the same standards.
So paid directories, especially there's a bunch of fly by night paid directories that will say they'll advertise themselves as being, oh, I'm a paid drank five or something like that.
You're pretty much guaranteed inclusion.
If you fork over the $50 or whatever it is, they don't doany substantial review.
They'll let you pick exactly everything, every attribute about it.
They don't execute substantial editorial discretion.
In many cases, these are the sort of directories that are like I found an expired domain and I just registered it, and now I'm a directory and I will take your money and I will link to you.
And it's absolutely the case that we do take action on that.
And for example, we might lower the toolbar page rank, which is often an indication that the forward links of this site are not necessarily trusted.
So if you're paying money to that directory, it's not really doing you any good.
Now. I would draw a little bit of daylight between some of those lower quality or even spammy paid directories versus there are some directories like Yahoo that tend to exercise editorialdiscretion.
They might reject a substantial amount of the entries. And so that tends to be the sort of litmus test
I've written blog posts or at least written online about this before things like the amount of editorial discretion.
Whereas if it's just a fly by night where you can get any text approved and you can choose exactly what it is and no one is really looking at it like it's a directory that's run with a script.
That's the sort of thing that we absolutely do take action on.
But it is the case that we look at the value out of that directory. We look at how much work they're putting in, and then if it's not substantially a lot of work, if it primarily appears to be more or less a link scheme, then it's absolutely the case that paid directories are held to the same standards as paid links