Words: Ashley Rigg
Published: May 7th 2009
Property links – rules of thumb for buying directory links
There are thousands of crap directories on the internet. Many of them are not worth the time it takes to submit your site as Google has devalued them. However, there are a number of strong property links that you can acquire for minimal budget. We
recommend 10 great links here that meet the criteria below.
Domain Level Rules
A link from the BBC or New York Times is worth hundreds of dollars each month. This is because they attract lots of links and
also because Google has biased its algorithms towards editorial sites. If
you can get links from sites that have lots of links, particularly
editorial links pointing to them, it will help you rank higher in the engines. When listing in a directory, the main thing to look at is the sites link profile. Here are 4 rules of thumb to help you.
- Does it have a good number of relevant back-links? Use Yahoo site explorer like this to find out.
- Do the back links contains some editorial links on the first few
pages of Yahoo site explorer? Google weights links from editorial sites
very highly.
- Is the domain more than 2 years old? Google trusts older sites much more than newer ones. Use this tool to find out.
- Does the site publish interesting editorial regularly. If so other editorial sites are likely to link to it? This is not 100% essential but is a real bonus if you can find sites like this.
Page Level Rules
Once you have established that the site concerned has a good number of quality, relevant links pointing to it, the next step is to evaluate whether the link you will get is worthy spending time and money on. Here are five rules to help you sort the good from the bad.
- Does the site have a category relevant to your business? Links on relevant pages help you rank better for terms relevant to your business.
- Is the relevant category page where your link will go within three clicks of the homepage? Otherwise the power of the link will be diluted.
- Is this page in the Google index. Copy and paste the URL into the Google search box like this. If it is not in the index, don't bother wasting your money or your time!
- Does this page have any PageRank? This measure is a little outdated but can be useful none the less. You can use the Google Toolbar for this
- How many other links do the directory pages have on them? The fewer
the better, as more link juice is passed to your site when there are less links on the page. We limit our links to 20 per page for this reason.
Red Flags
Over the past 18 months Google has worked hard to devalue paid for links and directories have been one of the casualties with many sites being devalued. If the directory you are thinking of listing on has any of the following characteristics then be careful, you may be wasting your time.
- Is it badly-organised? Better organised sites attract more links and are less likely to be punished by the Google if they manually review the site.
- Is it full of Adsense advertising in prominent positions where content and navigation should be? A bad sign if it is, as it looks spammy and is more likely to get devalued by Google.
- Can anyone list and write anything they like? The best directories are human edited to make them useful to users.
- Does it overtly sell text links (links with the right keywords in them)? If it does, and if it hasn’t already, it may get punished by Google, which means any link from their site could be worthless
Globaledge is an award winning business-to-business site that is also extremely visible to consumers on Google. There are many benefits to listing your business.
- Drive traffic to your website. We sent over 750,000 clicks to business directory listings in 2008.
- Be contacted by potential referral partners in 180 countries. Globaledge won "Best Partnership Product" at the OPP Awards in 2008 for helping agents develop business across national borders.
- Get a direct link to your site on a powerful page. The Globaledge.co.uk homepage has a PageRank of 5.
- Many of our directory pages have PageRank of 2 and 3.
- Globaledge has thousands of inbound links including links from powerful editorial sites like Business Week.
- Our site was established in 1998 which increases the value of our links
- You can add your logo for extra visibility
- Add your own company profile page
- Add a private message button which allows potential partners to contact you quickly and easily
- We are currently trialing a half price offer. Our links were £70 per year. We are trialing a half price promotion for the next 30 days. List your business now to secure the half price deal
What our customers say
"Globaledge is the single biggest traffic referrer to my website after Google. It's a powerful, well optimised site and it's incrediably useful for finding partners and potential property deals"
David Stanley Redfern, Director, DSR Ltd
"In the last few months, we signed 7 contracts with agents and property developers that have contacted us through Globaledge"
Matthew Wellfare, Director, FindaPlaceOverseas
User Comments
Very Intresting, thanks!
michael sommer,
Reknova GmbH