Thread: Matt Cutts Talks About Directories

This is good news for directory owners and submitters, but it also gives some good advice about determining quality.

Are you interested in hearing about directories in this report?
A: Nope, I’d be most interested in feedback like the examples that I mentioned above, or things like paid posts that might affect search engines. If you’re still unsure what sort of reports we’d like to get, that’s okay. Fortunately, the vast majority of people sending in reports are on the same wavelength and are sending in solid feedback like the examples above.

And also:

A: I’ll try to give a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory. When considering submitting to a directory, I’d ask questions like:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.

This second quote tells me that we might want to get away from "Featured" link and instead have "Express submission" and "Regular Submission" but possible Express could be listed ahead of Regular, and could even tell customers this.

Quote from:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/

Thanks for the update. It is good if google doesn't discount directories for those that have put alot of effort into developing their directories :-)

But will google stick to this. If they are really going to devalue paid links or purchased links, they would have to hit the directories.

They are setting up a hard situation for themselves, going to be interesting to see what they do.

I think they just want to especially look for cases where it is apparent people are trying to manipulate pagerank in a big way. I think google may actually like the idea that humans are reviewing the links on directories for quality.

I don't think google would not be interested in directory report, as google itself has a large directory, the Yahoo Directory is a paid directory

That seems the best thing to do when it comes to the paid links thing. Start earning from submission evaluation rather than selling feature link spots.