greenleaves - 6:37 pm on Oct 11, 2006 (gmt 0)

I believe the downfall to most directory rankings is that they don't focus on a specific industry.

Many directories can be very useful to one industry, while having almost no use in another. There are many reasons this can happen. A directory can have a high page rank for one category and no PR for another. A directory can have traffic pertaining to one industry and nothing pertaining to another. An industry can have a limited source of links (very small niche industries) while other can have an almost infinite array of linking possibilities. If I was to market bungee jumping potatoes, and if Jayde had a category for this, a listing here would be a lot more valuable than a listing in the online contest industry. This is because it is easy to get links from contest related sites to your contest site, while it is almost impossible to get bungee jumping potato links (since they are so few), so any link you can get will help. Also, some industry links can be very expensive to buy while others can be dirt cheap.

So the only way I believe directory rankings have value is if they are industry specific. Some factors I consider important:

1- How many back links does the directory have? What is the quality of the back links (do they have links from prominent players in your industry?)?
2- Does the directory (or one of its pages) come up under industry terms?
3- How many results come up under a search for the directory name? Are the comments good/bad?
4- The PR of the page you want your site on.
5- The amount of links on the page you want your site on, as well as the quality of the links you will be next to.
6- Does the category page you want have links pointing directly to it?
7- What is the value of a link in your industry? For a lawyer’s website, links would be a lot more expensive then for a ring tone website. So $60 for a listing might seem high to the ring tone guy, but to the lawyer's SEO, this is a very small portion of a marketing budget.

I would have added traffic, but since this isn't measurable from an outside stand point, I did not include this as a factor in my list.