Linkbuilding: Web Directories

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 18:51:20 +0000

Directories are the bread and butter of SEO, but not all web directories are created equal. Google ranks websites based on citations or inbound links. The theory behind this is that inbound links are less open to manipulation than certain on-page and on-site factors that a particular webmaster has more control over e.g. meta descriptions, meta keywords. Directories are one of the easiest routes to acquiring more links to your website and are one of the more over-utilised link building technique amongst SEO Experts. There are literally thousands of web directories on the Internet – so how do you go about finding the ones that will actually contribute value to your website?

The first thing you should do is find a top directory list. Two particularly prominent directory lists can be found on info.vilesilencer.com and seocompany.ca. These lists publicise what are essentially a very strong collection of directories. However, this does not mean that each directory in these lists is an appropriate directory to submit your website to. A directory that is appropriate for one site may not be appropriate for an entirely different site. Google crawls the web in reverse order, starting with the pages it deems most popular and working its way back. Some of the categories listed in directories are considered relatively un-important by Google. A great majority of directory categories are not even indexed by Google. Submitting a website to one of these categories is, therefore, a relatively pointless process, seen as Google has not deemed the category important enough to be indexed.

The best way to determine the relative importance of a category is to check Google’s cache date for that category. You can do this by using the cache: operator and typing the URL into Google. If the category has been indexed by Google in the last month then it is a category worth submitting to. Another good indicator of the value of a category is the Page Rank value of the page on which the category exists. If the category has even a minimal PageRank value then the odds are that category will be considered relatively important by Google and will be crawled in a relatively short space of time (thus picking up your link).

Chris Thomson is a professional Internet Marketer. Please visit SEO Company for more information. Alternatively visit Chris’s definitive guide to SEO.

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Linkbuilding: Web Directories

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