What types of directories are seen as sources of paid links?

Fábio Ricotta from Brazil asks:

"Will Google consider Yahoo! Directory and BOTW as source of paid links? If no, why is this different from another site that sell links?"

Recorded on April 23, 2009.

• Category

  Science & Technology

[dante2428]

2:06 When mentioning links, I think you should put them in the video description or annotation.

[specop17]

Have found BOTW has improved a lot in the last few years since they got their NERD herd from ODPDMOZ.

[Darvys]

It means we should only sell links to high valued sites? Because Yahoo does that and it's not a problem...

As I suppose, Google don't want us to sell links to junk websites, they're the only problem in this case...

[YetiesDirectory]

Hi Matt,

You said that you have a blog post out where you talk about some of the other different factors of a directory and weather you might consider them as real. Would it be possible for you to give us a link to this blog post?

[crisparaosintimos]

opá ótima pergunta para o super hiper Matt - do Fábio - show!

[agapitoflores001]

Now this is issue is clarified. Thanks to this video.

[seorankings]

Allowing a few directories to pass link juice is important. Unfortunately all of the old directories such as Yahoo, botw and joeant have so many links now that some of the pages aren't getting indexed, and might not even be crawled. So when a lot of newer sites get listed they never get found. Hopefully Google understands this and allows some newer high-quality directories to pass link juice too. Those old directories are still good, just be sure the page you submit to is getting indexed, first

[hairyfrankfurt]

To do with the getting people to know your site, what are the best places on the net to promote and market a website? Does Google appreciate linking on social network sites?

[motherknucker]

There is no harm is submitting to any no. of directories but also there is no use.

Stop wasting time on submitting your site to any directory you come across.

[sameerpanjwani]

At the same time, there isn't much harm submitting to free direcotries, especially when you can get free services like Directory Maximizer to submit for you at a nominal cost. There are a few directories on their list that are very selective about the sites they list (so they could be good links). Yes, there are other directories as well that accept just about anything, but is there any harm? I've seen sites that rank just by having links from directories, how does that work?

[Christopher Roberts]

Very useful info, thanks :)