The New Directory Era at SEO News Blog

This weekend Google finally updated the backlink count in their Webmaster’s Center (this section was not updated for more than two months). Plenty of new links showed up from our massive link building campaigns, but something really interesting popped out – Low Quality web directory links, spammy looking links and site-wide links on irrelevant websites do not count any more as backlinks and were not longer listed there. I also checked with Yahoo Site explorer and found out that the situation with Yahoo is almost the same.

The last few months search engines took serious measures against Search Engine Spam and one of the most important changes in their algorithms was to find and neglect/discount any spammish looking links. The amazing thing is that most web directories that accept all sorts of links got labeled “not trustworthy” and their listings are no longer counted as backlinks. This was somehow expected in the webmaster world because there is no way to link to junk sites and not being labeled junk site.

This event really struck most of my websites due to the mere fact that my base strategy when releasing new website was to get 1,000 directory submissions for each of them and therefore give them the initial boost both in backlink count and also

pagerank. Now, with those changes in mind, this strategy is not that profitable and requires some drastic changes.

Here I’d like to say that search engine spiders still follow those links, because the spider activity on those sites did not decrease and we can see few hundred visits daily from googlebot on a website with only few pages which is actually a good thing and helps new content get indexed faster, so it’s not a total waste of money to do directory submissions.

Which Directories are now valuable with those changes?

Few months back I was never ever going to say such thing, but yes Paid Directories are the New Directory Era. That is mainly due to few very important characteristics that make them extremely valuable and somehow trustworthy:

Paid directories usually contain only few links, and those links are with some relatively good quality. Most webmasters pay for link only if they have some good content site and know that they will profit out of their website, therefore their quality is quite better than regular MFA’s and other crappy websites.
Most of the Paid Directories make their own review text that is placed on the listing page and this Unique content helps directories actually rank and therefore pass greater value to your links.
In fairly large percentage, paid directories invest a lot of money in building backlinks for their onw directory and therefore gain better trust rank for themselves. This actually passes quite a lot PR to your listings compared to even high quality free directories. Yes high quality free directories will still keep their good trust ranks and will still have value as backlinks, but we all know that getting a DMOZ listing is a one in a million chance.

So which paid directory I should submit in?

Choosing the best paid directory to submit your listings is not that hard thing to do, but yes it also requires few additional steps then just add the links. Basically the most important characteristics that form their quality are the following:

Base (homepage) Page Rank – must be better or pr 5
Number of incoming backlinks – visit yahoo.com and type site:www.domain.com and then click on inlinks. That will give you fairly accurate number of links pointing to that directory. Any number larger than 100,000 is good and should be considered as reliable directory. Make sure you are looking at the INLINKS not the site pages, because site pages are different story and not that valuable.
Number of Outgoing links aka listings – try to browse few categories and if you don’t see tons of listings in the most popular ones and only a few in the smaller categories then the directory is good. If they have a lot of listings this might mean that they might be linking to bad sites and that won’t do you any good, so good neighborhood is what really matters here.

I have one very simple formula for estimating the value of one directory if I want to pay for it – just divide the number of links to the number of pages that they have (from site:www.domain.com command). The number that you end up with is what I call Link Juice Value and the higher it is the better.

Any suggested good directories?

Yep, I’ll build you a list very soon (check this post for updates), but the first one that comes to my mind is www.avivadirectory.com – a really nice directory that charges quite a lot ($49.95) but it’s worth the money since aviva has more than half a million backlinks and only few hundred links. The list is sorted by Link Juice starting from the highest to lowest: