Business.com’s redirected links
Note – Please see update at the bottom of this post.
For any of you contemplating a listing in Business.com as a part of your overall SEO campaign, think again. Business.com has gone the way of redirecting links in the directory, probably negating any backlink juice that you might be expecting. And, they are doing it in kind of a sneaky manner.
If you look at a Business.com listing page and hover over a listing link, you’ll see the URL for the site in your status bar, which would make you think that it is a direct link. However, if you click on the link, a new window opens and if you look quickly, you’ll catch a glimpse of the redirection taking place.
Business.com tells me that their standard listings, which are still javascript redirects but with an href component, are seen as real links by search engine spiders. I haven’t been able to confirm that this is actually true, though the code looks like it could possibly work. I tried running a Business.com directory page through some spider simulators, though, and all they saw were redirected links.
So, based on this and a history of mid-course changes in the past (at one point they used nofollow tags), I can’t recommend paying for a listing with them.
At one time I recommended a listing in Business.com. If you honestly believe that you will get enough traffic and business for the hefty $199 per year fee, then that’s another story. But, if you thought a listing in Business.com would be a part of your SEO strategy, move on. Right now, it’s just not that clear that it would be worth it.
UPDATE – I contacted Planet Ocean (who puts out Search Engine News) about this issue a few months ago and they they put Business.com’s linking structure to the test. They are now recommending a Standard listing in Business.com again. Here’s what Search Engine News has to say as of Sept. 2007:
As to whether their links are passing link equity: the Standard Listings section on their directory pages does have direct links—although they use JavaScript to generate a redirected tracking link on the fly after the link is clicked. This gives the impression that the link is redirected. But the fact that the full URL is present in the code means that search engines are seeing it and crediting the link juice.
The bottom line is that we are back on the Business.com bandwagon—although we recommend that you zero in on the Standard listing if you’re using them for link building.
So, I’ll be adding Business.com back to my recommended directories. Thanks Search Engine News!
Read more in my post Best Directories – A Work in Progress .
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