I was recently posed a question regarding directories and their usefulness in today’s SEO armoury. Directories unfortunately belongs in the past now although I still find that there are a very select few which work on non competitive terms. I did a few directory submits for a client recently and they did rank on that term but to be honest it was unsustainable as they had not implemented my on-page recommendations.

As far as I know, you can’t get banned from having many directory links however, I’d always be careful with submitting directory links by bulk. The trick is to stagger submissions so not to arouse suspicions of unnatural linking from the search engines.

Someone mentioned to me that a competitor has many links from directories and still rank well. Obviously, link popularity isn’t fully maintained on backlink numbers alone. Check if they don’t have backlinks from authoritative sites as well. Look at PR, Domain age and relevance as usual. Also, check if they are listed on DMOZ (Despite some of DMOZ’s shortfalls). Many directories are weird these days as you have to be aware of the nofollow tag or if they javascript redirect to website. These two methods are worthless to your website. I also rarely find myself paying for directory listings either.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Link Building, SEO Blog News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.