Bid Directories - Recipe for success or disaster?

[BM7]

Hi There SEO Elite,

One of my competitors has recently gone from page 3 to well above me on page 1 on our moderately high competitive keyword. Their site has 20 pages and ours is a combined e-commerce / niche information site with 1000 pages+ of which 40 are purely informational written by us,300 PDF brochures and 550+products with mostly hand written descriptions.

On looking at the competitor's links in Open Site explorer, they had huge numbers of inbound links from bid directories with many using anchor text of the keyword, and usually $2 bids. Many of the bid directories are 'linked' as they all have an almost identical template and menu etc. But these are all giving the top PA and DAs on their report. Their DA, PA and LRD is also marginally less than ours? Our total links is 26,000 theirs is 100?

Shouldn't penguin be burying them for these low quality paid links? Or is it just not been gotten around to yet?

They seem to be sailing high on $500 worth of Bid Directory links.

To follow or stay away?.....that is the question

Also, other competitors have Yahoo directory listings. These are $300. Is Yahoo directory entry worth it for our SEO with Google being 80-85% of my inbound search traffic?

Thanks for your advice

[matbennett]

Those directories may well be helping. However just because they appear on OSE doesn't mean that Google give a fig about them.  What we do know for sure is that Google are on a rampage against low quality link building and paid links.  Those links sound like a pretty clear definition of both.

If you followed suit they may or may not help in the short term. They could also bring a penalty.  Don't assume that because 1 site hasn't been penalised anyone is safe. Something that might tip the balance for one site might not for another than has other things in it's favour.

You also need to consider what might happen in the next update. We know that this is the sort of thing that Google are out to stop, so the very best outcome is that you close the gap, but increase you chance of a penalty.

You have to decide for yourself where the risk/benefit line is for you.  However don't be tempted by short term frustrations as you can do things quite easily that have a long term effect.

I'd start by assuming those directories are not helping, then see where else they might be getting an advantage. If it really looks like it is those directories use that as a guide to how much authority and anchor weight you might need then start with less risky sources.

Re Yahoo : Honestly I've not been able to measure any gain from it for a long time. Certainly not direct! However $300 isn't much if there is some trust benefit from that.

[SEOdub]

We paid for Yahoo and I am a firm believer in the trust and authority it offers, there aren't many PR8 sites that you can pay to be a part of and not get penalized by Google for it.  Forget about Yahoo search, it pushes authority and trust to all SE's, Google in our case.

[matbennett]

I can't decide about Yahoo.  I've tried to spot patters in ranking change when we've added or expired a listing, but have never been able to see anything conclusive.  It's also an absolutely textbook paid link (it's not like it sends traffic),.

You say it yourself; "Forget about Yahoo search, it pushes authority and trust to all SE's" - therefore we're doing it just to manipulate rankings.  I can't believe Matt Cutts (or anyone else in search quality) has never asked the question "Should we allow Yahoo listings to pass authority - they're just paid links?".  It does have manual review in it's favour, but otherwise it is hard to justify.

Might be interesting to run an experiment where someone tries to alter a site's position using only well known, manually reviewed directories.