One issue that plagues many paid inclusion directories is that search engines don't like them. Many times this is due to poor content, for example categories with no listings look an awful lot like spam pages since they have no content.
So I just spent about an hour cleaning up my paid inclusion web directory which is still well liked by the search engines (Google has 12,000 pages indexed and Yahoo shows 2,630 backlinks). I didn't have many empty categories since I started the directory with 300 categories and have added them as needed (and now have around 600).
All in all I'm confident that I'm doing everything I can to keep search engines interested in my paid inclusion directory while not flooding it with sites (which would dilute the value of each listing).
A comment on back to number one in Yahoo asks if I recommend the Digital Point coop. Sure I do. But learn how to use it before you get started.
You don't want the bulk of a sites links to be transient, as many coop links are. I used to send more coop weight to my travel blog because it makes more money than my other sites.
Now I know that my travel blog can't safely handle all that weight. I send more weight to my less profitable education site which already has many thousands of backlinks.
I've yet to try Link Vault although many people swear by it. I will tri it too, when I ahve a bit more time to learn the system better. For now I'm divvying up my Digital Point coop weight as best I can. I have much of it going to deep pages in my sites that I'd like more people to see.
So by all means check out the Digital Point ad coop. Just use it wisely.
A number of people on the different webmaster forums out there are complaining that their Yahoo checks are being made out to their usernames rather than their real names, particularly when the business information field is left blank.
The general consensus seems to be that to avoid the problem altogether your best bet is to fill in the business information field with your personal information (assuming you're not a business entity).
Other than that, you can do two things. Send the check back to yahoo and ask for a corrected one. Or most banks will let you deposit a check made out to "gumpersag" or wahtever as long as someone signs it over to you. Just sign your user name and deposit the check. Don't bother trying to cash it.
Not too long ago I was postin aout how I found people willing to my link building cheap on rentacoder.com. However there may still be some truth in the old "you get what you pay for" adage.
I've got three projects now. 2 link builders from India and one from Ukraine. The one from Ukraine recently announced he had my 100 links (107 actually) and that I should check them to make sure they were acceptable. I almost didn't bother but I said why not?
So I spent an hour or so checking the links he got for me and found over 50 that were no good because they had one of these problems:
1. Placed on pages with more than 40 outgoing links.
2. Placed on pages not indexed by Google.
3. Placed on pages with non-travel related links.
Those were the three criteria I set forth in my bid request. I should have also said no link exchange systems, meaning those things where you trade links with 50 sites at once and each link page is pretty much identical. You'd think a professional link builder would know better, and this guy had very high ratings...
Long time readers may remember that my travel blog was dropped from yahoo's search results for a number of terms where i used to be ranked number 1. This was due to yahoo penalizing sites with too many rotating links (like the ones I was getting from the digital point ad coop which propelled me to the #1 rankings in teh first place).
I dumoed most of the coop links and paid for some reciprocal link building on rent a coder. I'm back to #1 for my three main target keyword phrases on Yahoo.
Interestingly, Google still prefers to show completely irrelevant results instead of my site. In fact if you do a search on Google for travel plan idea, the tenth result will be some comments from my travel blog without the blog entry itself. How useless is that result?
I've been hiring people to do my link building for me and so i wanted to give someone FTP access to my "directory" folder on one of my sites hosted with globat.com.
I couldn't figure out how to get this done wih their control panel so I emailed support. I was surprised to learn that you can not create an FTP account and give it access to he one folder:
Since www.sportsthunder.com/directory is included in your main files, any of your ftp user cannot access it without you giving them your username/password. The only work around for this is for them to upload files on their subaccount. Then you would have to download these files in order to add it on the "directory" folder.
http://www.seo-search-engine-ranking.com/ad_network_222.php