Web Directories‎ and Sponsorships in 2014?

[affigroup]

Yes I know many of you will say that link building using web directories is old school and does not work. But after studying a website created last year, it ranks in the top 10 "how make a website" run by Peter Zaborszky.
I noticed that he has links from web directories. Not many but he used web directories..

My question is: What you sort a list of web directories and only use ones with high PR and DA . Is this safe?

Another remark, what is the difference between web directories and page where donors/sponsors are mentioned with anchor text and dofollow link?. Those pages like web directories contain quite a lot of links from same page. I'm curious how Google sees these pages.

[JaneCopland]

What you sort a list of web directories and only use ones with high PR and DA?

Well, if I were going the directory route I'd first look at the relevancy of each directory to what I'm selling, meaning that I'd look specifically for sites in my niche. From those, I'd use PR and DA to determine strength and possible penalties (i.e. if the DA is insanely high and the PR is non-existent, perhaps steer clear). PR isn't a great metric, as it's updated infrequently and may well be sometimes obfuscated to avoid it being used as a link-selling metric but comparing it to other things like number of links and Moz figures can be useful still.

I'd then progress to more generic directories that had categories relevant to me and do the same thing - order them in terms of perceived strength and likelihood that their intended user-base was interested in what I sold.

From the directories I chose, I'd look very carefully through their links - you're judged on who you're linked to alongside, so get rid of any that link to what you'd call low-quality sites, parked domains, etc.

I would be willing to bet that sites with good rankings who have gone in for directory SEO are ranking largely because of other factors, as directories are not something Google likes to put a lot of weight into anymore, and has become better at picking out. And as "holistic" as it sounds, I'd choose directories based off of whether I'd want to be listed there if SEO didn't exist. It's just a case of this tactic having been used so many times for spammy purposes that search engines end up devaluing it or being quite suspicious of it.

What is the difference between web directories and page where donors/sponsors are mentioned with anchor text and dofollow link?

Not very much in that a Google rep would likely tell you that sponsors / donors' links should be nofollowed because money changed hands in establishing the relationship. But this will likely be just one page on a website, and for many businesses the number of links won't be astronomically high. If the outbound link numbers are very high, they might attract webspam team attention. As an SEO, I've done FAR more to encourage sponsor linking than go around trying to nofollow these links, however, as have most people. We haven't got to the stage yet where Google has put out memos about this being not-white-hat, but that's what a webspam team member would likely say. I'd still not link out from a site to my sponsors using their commercial anchor text ("car insurance", "mobile phones") - I'd link with their names.