Thread: How Valuable are Directories?

It seems that as I continue to submit my sites to directories, I am not seeing Backlinks. Are directories becoming less effective in terms of SEO and link building?

It depends entirely on the directory you get listed on DMOZ and Yahoo you will get a lot more visitors compared to if you submit to "BigBobsDirectory", you can find top directories and submit to the best..

You have to ask yourself who uses Directories? Ive never used DMOZ as I know how to use the full potential of Google.
Such as if I want to visit a Arcade Website. I can find a directory and click around to find the category get an arcade listed on their ordered alphabeticly, or type in google related:miniclip.com find the top arcade websites.
Therefore to answer your question, not relay.

Their are many benefits of adding to directories such as the few visits, backlinks to your website and increase your keywords to website.

Thanks to the Top Directory list as well as the advice.

Some directories really counts as backlinks and some just don't. Some gives a little traffic, some doesn't benefit you at all. Sometimes it is not fair anymore to submit to directories. It helps somehow but if you target more traffic and conversion for your site, it will be better to focus more on other things.

Submit few directory is not enough.at least submit more than 400 directory.....But website like yahoo directory and dmoz really can boost your pagerank and also traffic.

The effectiveness of your directory submission will mainly depend on the web directory whether it's quality or not. If it's quality, it can help increase your site's backlinks and can also help increase your keyword rankings in serp. However, their effects are quite minimal, so better not much focused on this and try also other link building methods.

Ones like DMOZ have great value in terms of SEO.

Originally Posted by gmchun83

Submit few directory is not enough.at least submit more than 400 directory.....But website like yahoo directory and dmoz really can boost your pagerank and also traffic.

gmchun83 are right, but i can say more then 1500 free directory are available to submit sites. After that you can understand what benefit bring to directory submission for you.

Low PR directories are probably a waste of time because your link doesn't get indexed by google often!

Some may be valuable but not all!
Make sure you are submitting to directories which are old, do not link to pills/gambling stuff and have a pagerank of 3 & above.

yes, this is very useful. But my question is what is the approval rate. It seem that when I submit to 100 directories I only get maybe 5 listings. Is that pretty sad?

thanks for sharing PHP_Adam

It helps in many ways, i submitted my website to a lot of directories and got indexed in google within 5 days. But if you want valuable link back you have to measure the directory PR and whether it's generic or niche directory.

find a high pr directories. It can give you backlinks and boost the pr of your website.

The most valuable ones are probably the ones that charge a fee for inclusion. Free directories are a bit hit and miss. The best ones can be choosy about which sites they approve.

Submit to quality directories in your niche, that's the best way to get the most out of your submissions.

Most of the directories are that effective but there are directories that are valuable in search engine like google.

it can give you a backlinks.

I generally use the Info Vilesilencer directory list. They have all been certified as SEO-friendly, and the list can be downloaded as an excel spreadsheet for simplicity.

Most directories are very low value with little page rank and orginal content. Doesnt surprise me that google ignores them.

Good online directories are true assets to search engines because they are able to provide good linkage which drives their spiders or web crawlers towards websites which at value to the online community. With the ever-increasing number of websites, more and more people are interested in the building and search engine optimization services however, not everybody is able to create legitimate websites which offer true value to visitors, this is where the spam problem begins.

Spamming the search engines is not a beneficial practice because it ends up degrading the quality of the content which is being indexed and the rewards are not as high as the risk which is taken. It has been said many times that the best SEO practice is to create content which is worth linking to, in other words you would kill two birds with just one stone by creating such content which will be indexed as the original version will bring visitors time and time again.

With the degraded value that reciprocal links now have the search engine strategy of choice seems to be directory submissions, providing your information to online directories will effectively increase your back link count, all the links that you get from these sites are called one-way links, these have an inherent higher value when compared to reciprocals simply because they are harder to obtain and are created in a more natural way.

As a webmaster the best way to get high-quality links is to evaluate the way the directory indexes links, you need to pay close attention to their categories and subcategories in order to determine whether or not the site is letting its index gets spamed, you'll also to take in consideration the navigational structure and the amount of advertising which is shown in each and every page.

As a visitor the most important factor is relevance, if the content your browser is not relevant to your search or query that you are very likely to leave the site within the first few seconds after your arrival, savvy webmasters can learn from this experience in order to optimize their content more people instead of web crawlers.

Another very important factor which adds value to online communities is the niche which the site targets, general directories will definitely provide some value to the end user however, those which are geared towards a specific topic will ultimately have more weight in the search engine results pages and provide more value to visitors.

Originally Posted by PromoJunkie

Ones like DMOZ have great value in terms of SEO.

But how easy is it to get listed on DMOZ? It would be very nice if you could explain that too...in detail.