Anyone Have Experience w/Microsoft Small Business Directory?

Here's a question to anyone in the MS Small Business Directory: Do you get much traffic from here?

I know that they give you some high PR links for the $49 per year, but any traffic? Here's the home page : http://sbd.bcentral.com/. I have a fascination with this directory and may consider buying into it.

Also, I'm curious to see if being in this directory will help in the future MSN search. Maybe similar to how being in Looksmart helped with MSN a while back.

Any suggestion/ideas?

I've gotten no traffic directly from the being in the directory, though Google started showing the backlinks immediatly. After only a few days, if you searched for my company name, which is unique and returns about 1k results, my "business card" on the SBD showed up in the top 20.

It may also depend on what category you are going for. The category I'm in there are 100's of businesses in it. But if you were in a smaller category, people may find the category via a search engine and then find your company.

As far as the current MSN Search engine, I'm showing up about where I show up on Google and Yahoo, and my competitors that are ahead of me in certian terms that aren't in the SBD are still ahead of me.

I haven't entered it but I saw another Chat member's business card for its keywords in the top 20-40. That impressed me.

I'll probably go into it.

Dave

yea, looks like it depends on what category. Some of the categories have many sites and the link will be buried.

True! They also don't seem selective enough either. I can tell that even if I add my site to a little known area, I will get swamped by tons of unrelated sites in a few months.

My business card listing showed up in the top 20 results for some searches and I got traffic through the pass-along. I'm also thinking it would be MSN's way of competing with the Yahoo! Directory and Google DMOZ Directory.

My listings are number 1 in all 3 categories but I am not getting any traffic from them.

I put my sites in there because of the high PR link. I do not expect any traffic from there because Microsoft does not promote that directory and it is NOT included in the MSN search. In fact on the MSN search pulldown menue there is not even an option to search the directory.