Once again, Dan Jensen has raised the bar in the directory world.
If you have been involved in SEO for more than two minutes, you probably know about Dan’s list of free directories at Vilesilencer. It was the first, and still is the best, list of free directories available. Dan keeps it updated like a clockwork, with major updates approximately once per month.
On the evening of September 2, 2007 my wife Aviva ran to my office in a panic. She exclaimed that Aviva Directory no longer seemed to be ranking for its own name in Google. I tried searching this, and sure enough, she was right. Even searching for “Aviva Directory” with quotes did not bring up this website. She then said, try Alive Directory - and we found the same result. We then tried Directory Dump and eWebPages and found the same thing.
My wife then tested the ranking of all the directories listed in our Strongest Directories List and found that over 60 of the directories listed were penalized. This formed the basis of many lists of penalized directories that were posted around the net, including SEOMoz. Brent went through his list of directories and found many more directories that had been penalized - bringing the total to over 100.
With all the internet marketing blogs today filled with information about social media marketing (and gossip about social media marketing!), it is nice to see some articles that deal with good, old school link building in a thorough and comprehensive manner.
Webcredible, a leading UK based usability and accessibility specialist has just published The Ultimate Guide to Directory Submission by David Eaves. It discusses many of the important issues a directory submitter faces, including choosing between free or paid directories, choosing between geneal or niche directories, the importance of page rank, choosing the title for your website, the importance of varying your description, deep linking directories, and the number of directories you should submit to.
Be sure to learn the basics quickly at this expert guide.
Here’s the latest update of directory backlinks (results are as of Monday, January 10). There seems to be a general trend downwards - it’s unclear whether this is due to the way Yahoo! calculate backlinks or whether backlinks are actually decreasing on many directories. However, several directories backlinks dropped considerably, and a few directories backlinks have increased.
More then 1,000,000 backlinks
http://dir.yahoo.com/ - 47,400,000 (yahoo.com)
http://www.dmoz.org/ - 3,280,000
http://www.alivedirectory.com/ - 2,460,000
http://iwebtool.com/directory/ - 1,420,000 (iwebtool.com)
http://www.bigweblinks.com/ - 1,310,000
http://www.business.com/ - 1,280,000
http://www.blazemp.com/dir/ - 1,050,000 (blazemp.com)
http://www.avivadirectory.com/ - 1,030,000
http://www.romow.com/ - 1,030,000
We have just done an update to our best web directories list. There haven’t been any major changes since the last update; just a few minor shifts in position.
Therre is a great post over at Fuzzuck about directory editing. They talk about how although most directory owners pay lip service to editorial integrity, few actually follow through. Although directory editing is not as glamorous as most subjects discussed in the directory community, it is actually one of the most important factors that will determine the longevity of a directory.
And of course, as Fuzzuck points out, directory owners’ standards are particularly low when it comes to accepting listings of other directories. Professional courtesy is great and what makes the community work, but it certainly should not be extended as far as lowering editorial standards.
Fuzzuck then asks:
Is it me, or is it becoming easier to distinguish the link pimps from the directory owners?
I’m not sure whether this question was rhetorical or not, but I’ll answer it anyhow. Honestly, I don’t think much has changed - it has always been easy to distinguish the link pimps from the directory owners.
Fuzzuck has posted his post to the “totally clueless” category. Cute :-)
Someone with a new directory recently asked me for advice on how to market it. Here are 9 marketing strategies that you can use:
1. Directory Lists. You want to make sure that you are on every possible directory list imaginable. Hunt them down and get your directory added. People use these lists as a basis for deciding what directories to submit to.
2. Link Building. Link building is important. This is because a quality directory has a lot of pages, and the more pages a website has, the more links it needs to be indexed and regularly crawled in the search engines.
A lot of people have requested that I update the list of Which Directories Have The Most Backlinks post. I have been somewhat hesitant to do so. Although backlinks to a web directory are no doubt important, I think there is too much emphasis in the industry on backlinks, and not enough on the content of the directory. If you or your company own a web directory, you may well be better served in the long run re-allocating some of your link building resources to the editorial side of operations.
That being said, I think the list is still helpful, so here’s the updated list. The snapshot is as of December 6, 2007. Please note that for directories that are in subfolders, the number of links is for the entire domain, not just the subfolder.
Three leading web directories got mentioned recently in the Washington Post: Apahcinc, Skaffe and Sporge. Here’s a copy of the article:
Unfortunately, the Washington Post, like most of the mainstream media and Wikipedia, did not give link to any of the websites.
There has been a lot of debate about how Google may treat bidding directories. Finally, Matt Cutts has made a statement about this. He says: “a ‘bidding directory’ that just gives the top slot to the highest money bid might not be as trusted by Google [as a high-quality directory].”
Well, that’s about as clear a statement as you will ever get from Google on the issue. So, it seems clear to me that Google does not like bidding directories.
I certainly don’t agree with Google on the issue. I mean, if Yahoo! Directory had the exact same content as it does but instead sorted its listings by bid amount, would it really be a less useful resource? I can’t really see how that would be the case. Does a page of resources become less useful because it is in a different order? Is a list of resources sorted alphabetically or by pagerank (as in the Google directory) really a more useful order to list things?
In any event, Google doesn’t care about my opinion, or the problems with its position. That being said, a quality bid directory will provide good traffic and can still be worth getting a listing in, especially if you are targeting a webmaster audience.
