Every webmaster dreams of seeing his or her website on top of search results for the targeted keywords or key phrases. But to achieve that, webmasters have to optimize their sites through a method called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in Search Engine parlance.

Today, Google is the most dominant Search Engine on the World Wide Web with above 70% of total searchers using it to find the information they want on the internet. Google uses a sophisticated technology whereby its bots/robots try to find the number of links pointing to a particular site that is related to the searched keyword or phrase. Of course mere numbers of links are not enough to put a site on top. The relevance of the site linking to it along with relevant contents are also very important.

Here comes the role of human edited web directories. These web directories are structured in such ways that they are like Pyramids –having categories and sub-categories related to any field on the web. Webmasters, whatever field their website might deal with can find a related backlink from a web directory. They work as the stepping stones for new websites by providing the much needed backlinks for quick indexing or crawling by search engine spiders.

Of late, there has been lots of criticism of web directories and many have termed them as link farms offering just backlinks to web sites and nothing more. While, the argument holds some truth – it is highly inaccurate. With the exponential growth of the internet and the flourishing web directory industry, many greedy webmasters are starting web directories just to cash in on the phenomenon. Most of these directories free directories made for AdSense and are mirror sites of others and owned by the same webmaster. Google is well aware of this fact and fortunately it is dealing with them swiftly by de-indexing those sites.

However, there are some high quality web directories that offer valuable web resources to the surfers and also quality listing opportunity to webmasters. Aviva Directory, Alive Directory, Best Of The Web,  are some of the high quality web directories. The most common feature of these quality web directories is that, they charge a nominal fee to review a particular web site. While many oppose these kind of fees charged by these web directories, owners of these directories have argue that – they have to charge a nominal fee for reviewing websites because

1) It costs to maintain high quality editors to review/edit listings.

2) It costs a lot to hire SEO specialists and maintain the quality.

3) It cost a lot to install extra modules so lots of additional information about listings may be offered to visitors.

4) It works as a deterrent against web spammers.

Few months back, Google initiated a crackdown on Paid Links and some web masters reported renowned web directories for selling paid links on Matt Cutts’ Blog (Head of Anti-Spam Bureau of Google). But they were disappointed by Matt Cutts’ reply who endorsed the review fee policy of quality web directories by saying-

”

Q: Hey, as long as we’re talking about directories, can you talk about the role of directories, some of whom charge for a reviewer to evaluate them?
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.Those are a few factors I’d consider. If you put on your user hat and ask “Does this seem like a high-quality directory to me?” you can usually get a pretty good sense as well, or ask a few friends for their take on a particular directory.

”

There is always a dilemma among webmasters whether to submit to hundreds of free web directories that cost little by way of submission fee or list in a few quality web directories that might cost higher depending on the number of directories one wants to list. To find out the answer, John Scott, CEO of V7N Internet Marketing Resource –did an experiment.

• He put two similar sites with similar contents (not duplicate) online.
• Submitted one site to 700 Free directories
• Submitted another site to 5 quality paid directories.
• After couple of months – the results started to show.
• The site he submitted to 5 quality paid directories ranked much higher on SERPs than the site which was submitted to 700 free directories not to mention higher Page Rank and higher traffic to the former!

So his experiment proves that 5 high quality directories can perform much better than all those free directories which are just taking up web space.

But all webmasters must remember that, not all Free directories are useless. Some of the high quality free directories that come into my mind are DMOZ (ODP), World Site Index , Web World Index, Abilogic. Webmasters have to have a very clear-cut strategy while dealing with web directories. They have to remember one thing though – IT IS QUALITY THAT COUNTS, NOT THE QUANTITY.

Some Use Full List of Web Directories

1. Aviva’s List of Strongest Directories based on SEOMOZ‘ Page Strength (PS) metric.
2. Bob Mutch’s list of directories based on Inbound Quality of Links
3. VS Dans List of SEO Friendly Directories
4. Jim Westergren’s List of over 700 Directories
5. Directory Critic -the watch-dob of the directory industry has a huge list of web directories

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 11:10 am and is filed under SEO Tips, Web Directory Resources, Admin Note. 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.