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MATT CUTTS: We have a question from San
Francisco, California today.
Blind Five Year Old wants to know: Why are paid directories
not held to the same standards as paid links?
I really enjoy that question, because I disagree with the
assumption.
Because I believe in many cases, or in substantially all
cases, paid directories are held to the same standards.
So paid directories--
especially, there's a bunch of fly-by-night paid directories
that will say--
they'll advertise themselves as being, oh, I'm a page rank
five, or something like that.
You're pretty much guaranteed inclusion if you fork over the
$50 or whatever it is.
They don't do any substantial review.
They'll let you pick exactly everything, every
attribute about it.
They don't execute substantial editorial discretion.
So, in many cases, these are the sort of directories that
are like, I found an expired domain, and I just registered
it, and now I'm a directory, and I will take your money,
and I will link to you.
And it's absolutely the case that we do
take action on that.
And, for example, we might lower the toolbar page rank,
which is often an indication that the forward links of this
site are not necessarily trusted.
So if you're paying money to that directory, it's not
really doing you any good.
Now, I would draw a little bit of daylight between some of
those lower-quality or even spammy paid directories versus
there are some directories like Yahoo that tend to
exercise editorial discretion.
They might reject a substantial
amount of the entries.
And so that tends to be the litmus test.
I've written blog posts, or at least written online about
this before.
Things like the amount of editorial discretion, whereas
if it's just a fly-by-night where you can get any text
approved, and you can choose exactly what it is, and no
one's really looking at it, like it's a directory that's
run with a script, that's the sort of thing that we
absolutely do take action on.
But it is the case that we look at the
value add of that directory.
We look at how much work they're putting in.
And then if it's not substantially lot of work, if
it primarily appears to be more or less a link scheme,
then it's absolutely the case that paid directories are held
to the same standards as paid links.