Thomasnet NOFOLLOW Links?

[poolguy]

Is it just me or does http://www.thomasnet.com only have nofollow links across the site now?

[BailHotline]

Hey Clintend,

I have never used this site before, but after looking at several business listings and their individual page, it does appear that their this a "<meta content="noindex,nofollow" name="Robots">" added to the page.

It's kind of weird that it is also on their main page... not sure why any one would want this on their top lvl pages.

[poolguy]

Ok yea, that's exactly what I saw.  It's $2,000 yr minimum to get listed in this industry directory.  If they're blocking their entire site, I can't say I'm going to be signing up.

Thanks

[DenverKelly]

If Thomas is no following their links you'd have to decide if the traffic Thomas would drive is worth the cost, I do think that a 2k cost for a link should provide some juice.

[poolguy]

Nope, was considering it strictly for link-building.  It's actually more like $2k for many links to deep pages, FYI

[Ecreativeworks]

If you're looking at it just for the link benefit, you will want to avoid Thomasnet -- the cost is not worth the benefit, which is little to none from a link juice perspective these days.

You may want to check out the openfos.com and mfgpages.com directories if you're looking for an industrial directory. You can get links from them for $150 a year in similar quantity to Thomasnet, with anchor text. You will not see as much traffic as a Thomasnet link, but we've seen measurable ranking benefit from those directories for industrial sites.

[Ecreativeworks]

I think you're probably seeing the "beta" version of the site that they're testing -- it looks like they're doing some kind of A/B testing with two different versions. Both of them have external links nofollowed, but only the beta version has the entire site noindexed.

[donford]

That was a very good question, and I had to respond to this so I can reference the responses later. I know we use Thomasnet, and I have for years thought they were extremely overpriced. Very astute observation.

[poolguy]

Hold the phone.  Turns out, they're doing Beta testing, you have to click on the Exit Beta up in the top right.

The links you get on category pages are still followed.

My Bad!

[PhoenixLander]

The BETA version of the site is noindex,nofollow'd, however non-beta version is fully open and indexed by search engines.  You can confirm this via the site: command in the various search engines.

[DeliaAssociates]

Does that mean that they're likely going to be using the beta version with noindex, nofollow at a later point, or is that just a temporary thing.

We're doing very well in organic listings right now, but we have Thomasnet for a client as well.  Trying to decide whether or not to keep them.  We're also getting over 10 times the traffic from PPC at only twice the cost.  Is there a major benefit from Thomasnet that I should be considering?