What is your determining factors when paying for a directory listing?

Is it price? Page Rank? Traffic? etc....

I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

Definately price. If they charge, I don't do it. There's too many free directories out there.

But if I were to pay for directory placement, they would have to be on topic and not have penalties or be banned. I'd check to make sure the site was WH. And I'd review their robots.txt, .htaccess and source files to make sure there aren't any nofollow commands or redirects, etc. I'd also want to know traffic. If I'd never heard of them, or they have lousy SERPs, I'd probably pass.

I don't buy PR because it doesn't mean anything to the bottom line.

We have paid for all kinds of stuff. Much of it was experimentation.

Now I'd only pay for topical directories. They have delivered convertable traffic. They pay off.

Over time we have been able to see patterns w/different sources of traffic. Generally directories have delivered virtually no traffic. Nowadays they are sources for 1-way links...but they don't convey much value. Think I'd rather pay for topical links that are written into the site content.

Topical directories have worked for us. They are worth something...it is a matter of figuring out the value.

Dave

Why pay when you can get them for free.

Normally I wouldn't pay since there are a lot of directories free... but there might be some exceptions, like topical, niche market dedicated directories that could realyl help if the price is reasonable.