What is the SEO value of Thomasnet

[dloeschen]

Ok, the company I work for has had a paid listing on Thomasnet.com. This was started long before I took over the marketing. We get no real value from Thomasnet, just a lot of solicitation for unrelated things. And my company has been paying $15,000 a year for this listing. Thomasnet is a huge waste of money and I want to cancel it. The problem is that I do not have a good understanding of the link value from Thomasnet. They have a high domain authority and we have a good number of links from them because we pay for the listing. If we stop paying, those links go away and I am afraid it will hurt us in our rankings. Any insights? Thanks!

[KevinBudzynski]

The way I always use them is if we didn't have a high organic position for one of our product lines, I would allocate points to get the no-follow link removed off the free listing. Did this help? I didn't notice any increase/decreases in organic positions for any competitive keywords (ie: widget). Did it help for long-tails (ie: stainless steel widget)? It seemed to help, but difficult to say.

Feel free to PM as I'm extremely familiar with their programs.

[Dubs]

I agree that Thomasnet is a waste of money... I haven't seen any increases in organic positions with clients that paid to have the Thomasnet listing

[dloeschen]

i'm not totally sure I understand what your saying. You would allocate points to get the link removed?

[dloeschen]

Our experience with Thomasnet is that we get all kinds of solicitations for people trying to sell us their services but not actually any sales. Just not sure of the SEO impact.

[KevinBudzynski]

Thomasnet has two types of listings: Paid & Free

Free Listings = Listings that have a nofollow attribute, free to list, follows paid listings
Paid Listings = Points allocated to these listings have the nofollow attribute removed

We still get some decent leads on ThomasNet (better than Macraes & GlobalSpec).

[KevinBudzynski]

I totally agree on this as well. I think it varies greatly on what product lines you are running listings on and the best thing to do is track the leads that come in via rfq's and phone (oof TN) and follow them to see if they convert. I think we can all agree that it is difficult to gauge the seo benefit on it.