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are Directories Important?
Why are Directories Important?
By: Aaron Wall
Usually you will not get much traffic from most directories.
With so few people searching through directories today,
a large portion of the traffic comes directly from people
finding the directory entries within search engine results.
The single biggest reason to list in directories is
that they help search engines understand what your site
is about and help improve your relevancy and position.
Some search engines such as Google make it extremely
rewarding for a webmaster to list their site in many
different directories.
The Two Most Important Directories: ODP and
Yahoo!
The Open Directory Project listings are entirely free,
and for that reason they sometimes take months to acquire.
Be patient, and do not resubmit your site for at least
6 weeks between submissions.
The Yahoo! Directory rivals the Open Directory as one
of the largest human edited directories on the web.
The Yahoo! directory has a recurring $299 [yearly] fee
for commercial sites, but is still free for noncommercial
sites.
Note: It takes a ton of effort to create
a comprehensive directory of the web. This is why Yahoo!
charges hundreds of dollars per year. This is why having
over 50,000 editors is still not enough for the ODP.
Other General Directories
A couple other important directories and web guides
are: About, the Virtual Library, GoGuides, JoeAnt, and
Gimpsy. A few good newer directories are Wow Directory,
BlueFind, Web Beacon, & Skaffe. Business.com charges
$99 per year for listing, and is well worth that price
for many people.
Topical or Niche Specific Directories
Many niche specific directories are focused on quality
and provide static text links to your site. These directories
not only improve your site's relevancy in search results
but also drive a significant amount of prequalified
traffic to your site. Many niche specific directories
are works of love and provide free listings.
Recent Directory Problems
- Some unscrupulous money hungry parties accept any
site that pays them. They place the sites in semi-organized
categories and call it a directory. Eventually these
types of directories get delisted from Google and
when they get banned you wasted your money.
- Directories Created to Sell AdSense: AdSense and
cheap link rentals have made it easy to create garbage
directories to collect your money.
- Duplicate directories: Sites such as emfind.com,
pearlfind.com, moonfind.com, findeyes.com, beyondfind.com,
and findww.com all look the exact same. I have had
about 20 directories similar to spain-directory.com
and splendes.com submitted to my site.
Summary
Since search algorithms are just programs without intelligence,
they must rely upon the intelligence of humans to structure
their search results. Human edited directories, for
this reason, are important to be listed in.
Since directories are becoming such a profitable business
model the number of directories will continue to steadily
grow throughout the rest of the year.
If those directories are not spending money advertising
or building their brand, or if you are unsure if a directory
is sketchy, ask around before spending any money.
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