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Your Opinion on Building a Local Business Directory

mikemike2mikemike2
in Other / Off Topic
I am building a good quality local business directory.  It will offer free and premium (paid for) listings.  I want to use the site for my own local SEO, to offer the premium version for free to some business clients and prospects, and maybe to make a bit of money with.  Enough to pay for some of these SEO tools, lol.

My first question is should I be using follow or no follow links and in which situations?  I am thinking free is no follow.

Do any of you run business directories?  Do they make any money?  Do they get traffic?  Any thoughts or opinions are welcome.

Thanks guys.


Comments

  • kxpkxp United States
    From a business perspective, the free links being nofollow makes sense, but Google is pretty clear that paid links should be nofollowed. So based on that, all links would probably need to be nofollowed. There were some pretty big de-indexings that happened in the past to directories for selling followed links.

    I've looked into making my own directories, but I just didn't feel like even trying to compete with Google. There are paid directories and I do see new listings being added consistently, so there's definitely a market for it. I just wouldn't be confident in the kind of traffic they'll get. Perhaps create a directory that charges a monthly or annual fee, then set aside money to drive traffic via paid sources like Facebook Ads, Outbrain, Google Ads, etc.
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