Raising PR - Problems with paid directories and what to do

Submitting to directories (both free and paid) is one of the methods depolyed by webmasters to help increase their site's Google PageRank (PR). And submitting to free directories (some of them with high PageRank themselves) is not only effective (to a certain extent), but well, free. It only takes effort, time and little luck to get into these directories.

Now we slowly come to the realm of paid directories. Paid directories simply means you pay for inclusion into their directory listing or you pay for a featured or sponsored listing to get to the top of the pile. The problem with paid directories is that not all are worth the money. Some are actually not even providing enough PR flow from their directories (if that is what you are looking for).

Here are some tips in regards to rasing PR to look out for when submitting to paid directories. Directories can also be used to drive traffic to your site and improve your Search Engine rankings, but it is beyond the scope of this article.

1. PR value of the category you are planning to submit to. Of course, the higher the better. Some directories have very low PR values for their categories. These are mainly sites (blogs/websites/forums) which have just been coverted to directories to make use of their high mainpage PR to sell listings. I have seen sites with their mainpage a PR5 but all their categories having PR of 0. It is up to you whether you would want to submit your listings to them thought I find that these "directories" will usually face a huge drop at the next public Google PR update.
2. The number of per category. Note that a PR4 page with 20 listings will actually distribute more PR to it's links than a PR2 with 10 listings. The more links the page has, the less PR will flow to each link, so try to look for a less popular category. Or even better, try to look for a high PR directory which has less listings per page. Hey, you are the one paying for it!
3. Check out the number of sitewide links the directory has. Sitelink links, like normal in-content links will also "leak" PR, which means that there is less PR for the listing links. Anyway, a good paid directory should not have a lot of sitewide links. In my opinion, having more than 10 sitewide links is a big thumbs down.
4. Get those sitewide links instead! Due to the fact that sitewide links are on each and every page of the directory, why not request to have your site's link sitewide? It will probably cost more, but you could potential get better PR. However, it would be wise not to get a sitewide link on a large directory with too high a PR, because a sudden influx of high PR links pointing to your site will certainly raise some red flags to Google. Unless your site itself is big and has a high PR.
5. Deeplinking! I had always said, always go for an internal page if possible. Having a lot of links pointing to your homepage will make Google suspicious and perhaps devalue the link. And you don't have to worry about PR. It will eventually flow back to your homepage (assuming that the page has a link back to your homepage). Most paid directories allows their clients to deeplink. Some even allows their clients to have 5 links, one to the product page, one to the sales page and so on. Just make sure these links are all on seperate pages/categories. In fact, I think if you pay them enough, you can almost do anything on their site.
6. Ensure that the paid directory you are going to submit to has a "details" page. Even if the PR of that details page is low, it will still push a little PR your way.

Always pace yourself when getting links so as not to get blacklisted by Google. If the links get devalued, then it will all be a waste. I think it would be prudent for a new site to maybe get less than 100 backlinks per week. As your site matures and Google feels that it can be "trusted" more, you can then increase the rate of new backlinks. Remember, just one sitewide link can result in thousands of links back to your site in a short period, so beware when asking for sitewides!

Other articles:
Internal Links - How to make full use of them
Effective Directory Submission
Increasing your Page Rank In Detail
OnPage SEO For Web Directory Owners
Link Exchanges Techniques
Additional Benefits of a High Page Rank (PR)
Secondary Article Writing - Link Baiting
Sneaky Bastard's Way of Getting Backlinks
Tiny Preview and Screenshots for PhpLinkDirectory V3.2.0
Outgoing links - Telling Search Engines what your page is all about
A Complete list of Directory Scripts
How NOT to run a directory - a submitter's point of view
Some tips for the paid directory owner
How often does Google cache your Site? A Project.
Our exclusive interview with Paul le Roux of WebWobot Search Engine
Good Planning = Good SEO = Results!
Article Writing for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Forget keywords meta-tag and think keyword density!