‘Bidding’ or ‘Bid for Position’ directories are the latest way to buy high PR links to your site. They usually have the normal directory category structure (though without subcategories) but they allow you to pay more so your listing appears above all the others in your category.

What has made these directories really popular (and profitable) is that the top ten bids are shown on the home page and some also have a ‘top bids’ page where the top twenty bidders are listed or have the top bidder listed on every page. So, by bidding more you can take advantage of the high PageRank of the home page. (Once a site is accepted, additional bids are accepted automatically).

One of the top bidding directories is Big Web Links Directory. It has a home PageRank of 7 and the top bid is $2000 (in total the home page is worth about $11000 at the time of writing). If this level of bidding is out of your range, the minimum bid is $49.90 which is pretty good value for a permanent PageRank 5 link. (Not all the directory categories have high PageRank, the Entertainment Category is one with PR 5).

I have a couple of misgivings about these types of sites. One is, as paid links go these are pretty easy for the search engines to detect, so will they be devalued? The second is, unscrupulous webmasters might artificially increase the bids. So, it is worth being a little cautious with the newer, less well-established bidding directories.

A selection of these sites can be found in the bidding directories page of the SEO Directory.