Listings, paid profiles and directories

[ecnic]

Hi,

In the industry I am working in (education), we do have a lot of portals offering paid listings (for example profiles featuring a school, the courses you offer, sometimes with reviews etc).

Almost all big competitors and big names normally do have these kind of listings.

Besides from having to decide if these sites really bring the relevant conversions, I am wondering about their impact on SEO.

An example for an offer:
Our Top Picks listing is a 40 word listing and logo we put on any 30 pages of our web site, example.com for 12 months, for $595 US. You can choose the pages you want, or we can put you on all our [category] pages, or certain continents/countries you want to target.

Now, I am wondering:

1. Do I have to worry about my linking profile ? (All of sudden a bunch of links with the exact same anchortext and content embedding to our site?)
2. Or can I just decide to go with a paid listing based on the link value the page offers me?

Looking forward to reading what you think!
Nicole

[kwoolf]

Hi Nicole. Really, you should focus on whether or not those links will bring traffic to your site. I would rather spend that kind of money on an adword campaign that targets visitors much more effectively than that offer you posted above. I assume by "embedding to our site" that you mean linking to your site, and when a bunch of sites start linking to your site with that anchor text, this tends to bring up the key words within that text in the SERPs, granted these sites are legitimate and of value. You're in a very competitive industry, so I wouldn't recommend chasing pages like this. Stay focused on the business and target the sites that your visitors are more likely to go to. It's far more time consuming, but the results will show to be far more lucrative than higher numbers here on SEOmoz.

[ecnic]

Hi Kevin,

thanks for your answer.

You write that I should focus on pages where relevant visitors are likely to go.

I think I can assume that these kind of websites are at least somehow relevant concerning the topic (since this is for example all about school reviews or helping students finding the right school)? Therefore the links are at least to some extend "justified".

But I think that these are kind of "hidden paid links", so I am not too happy about them and afraid that they will rather hurt our website in the long run.

[kwoolf]

Ah, I see. Many of those school review sites and forums charge users to access them, and I see they want to charge you to post your profile. If this is the case, you might want to check to see how other links show up to search engines. Just try a few searches with the exact anchor text seen in these sites to see where the pages come up in SERPs. This would be a good way to quickly gauge the value of your links from this site. Make sure you're logged out of Goolge, Yahoo, Bing, etc. before searching.

Now these are not paid links per se. You can read up about nofollow at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=96569 and then judge for yourself if these sites are breaking any rules, so to speak.

[ecnic]

They don't use nofollow, so this would be all regular links.

If we have a huge partnership, we would suddenly have links from more than 70 sites
all using the same anchortext.