OneLinkDirectory is a service that provides a categorized listing of web sites, much like any other directory.
The main difference is that in OneLinkDirectory, as the name implies, each category only has a single web site listed. So anyone who looks in that category sees only that one site. Well, two sites, actually…one featured (e.g. paid) site, and one free site. The idea is that if you grab the category of your choice, you have a lock on it. Nobody can take it away from you, and your site is guaranteed high visibility.
The free links are nothing special, just text links. You don’t get to add a description, the site just pulls the title of the page you’re linking to and uses that as the anchor text of the link. On the one hand, that’s good for your site’s SEO. On the other hand, OneLinkDirectory inexplicably decided to use nofollow links for free links, negating the SEO value of being in the directory.
The featured links have an image of the site, and you can type in a title and description. This is the link that catches a person’s eye when they go into a category (the free link is below the featured link, and not marked in any way). Unfortunately, they also decided to use nofollow for paid links.
So what’s the benefit to being in a directory that uses nofollow for links?
The directory is actually a thinly disguised opportunity to make money. The gimmick is that you pay for a featured listing in a category, with prices started at $395 a month for a top level category, and going down from there, and you get a percentage of the fees from all the categories under you. So if you pay for a featured listing in the Business category, you get a percentage of what someone pays to be featured in Business->Opportunities, or Business->HealthCare. And it doesn’t matter if you referred them or not, you get a commission.
That seems like a pretty good deal, although the monthly fee is pretty steep. But if you get that back from the fees of those under you, who cares, right?
Well, not really. If you go to OneLinkDirectory and click on the Income tab across the top menu, you’ll see a breakdown of what happens when you pay for a top category featured link. You earn only 5% of the fees from categories under yours, so you won’t earn back your $395 even when 20 second level categories under you are sold (because second level categories sell for less).
In fact, you’d need another seventy-some people on your second level just to break even. When you’re paying $395 a month and not getting any SEO benefit from it, it’s going to seem like forever until you break even. This opportunity is clearly only for those with a healthy income stream coming in already.
So is the directory useless? Not quite. It’s still in the early days, so you’ll have lots of people looking for categories to put free links into. So get in now, and put your free links into appropriate categories, and you’ll get some people looking at your links later. You might get some visitors or make some sales from this traffic.
In the long-run, buying a featured link might be a good investment, but you have to have enough income coming in from other sources that you can afford to treat it like a long-term investment.
Click here to visit OneLinkDirectory.