Recently a blog visitor asked me a question whether he can submit his new blog on technology and gadgets to different web directories and the top search engine rankings. There are many webmaster forums like digitalpoint.com, sitepoint.com webmaster-talk.com etc where daily hundreds of people announce their new web directories which are mostly based on phpld script which offers a free version too. Now lets get into detail if these kind of stuff is helpful to the users or not.
First of all what matter is a Quality Inbound Link from different websites which are related to your niche. Which means that a backlink from a related website even of less pagerank would be helpful to your blog when compared to a link from a very high page rank website of a irrelevant niche. In case of Web Directories the situation is quite different because these are the websites which organize all the websites on the web in different categories. Now getting listed on these relevant categories is useful because these are quality related backlinks to your websites.
In the recent years, most website directories are considered to be bad and if your website is listed on these your website can even get penalized which is the reason you should decide and research a lot before getting listed into them. There is no point submitting your website to thousands of web directories and getting listed in those , whose pages are not even indexed in the search engines, also these new directories would not have any quality backlinks which means that its a total waste of time getting listed into these.
Finding a Good Web Directory :
I would personally suggest submitting your websites to directories which are established ie which were launched years back and which are still running on the same goal of organizing different websites. These can be helpful to your websites rankings and using the right Anchor Text on these web directories in order to rank in the top of the search engines. Considering Page Rank of the directory while submitting is not the right criteria because the Page Rank would go to 0 anytime and there is no guarantee about this, hence taking PR as a single criteria while submitting is wrong. You need to check out the buzz about the directly all over the web, the backlinks to these directories using Yahoo! & Google linkdomain queries, the Alexa or Compete Rank to know if these directories get some decent traffic.
In the year 2006 i started a web directory called as Global Internet Index which has around 6000 different categories and a lot of information we have posted on different blogs under this website in order to help the visitors find the right information. At gii.in there are different listing options ranging from free to paid because the website approval does take some time & efforts in order to review them and there is no point in running a free web directory and then closing it at the end of the year while domain expires. There are many other good web directories which have been up from few years like botw.org, dir.yahoo.com, Dmoz etc which are really worth submitting to.
This post is regarding the web directories which list different websites and dont confuse yourself with the Blog Directories which are specifically for Web Blogs, we will write more about Blog Directories soon. Stay Tuned!
Good post.. there are people who would be opposing this! They feel that web directories are just spam junk.. might be because they visited those kind of web directories which were made with an intention to just list websites without any organizing of selection of websites to list in the directory.
Presently there are very few web directories which can be called as a good quality one, and submitting to them can still help in betterment of SE rankings for websites.
A few of them can be in everyone’s fingertips – Yahoo, Dmoz, Romow, botw, gii and few others. Would be good if you share a list of the best web directories worth submitting.
Chetan I agree with what are you saying. As far as directories are concerned one should have the knowledge of selecting for submitting the website. If you will select wrong one there are more chances of getting bad optimization effect on your website. Amit your directory is really professional one and it seems you have put in lots of efforts to get that going.
I never try to submit to web directories, because i don’t know any good web directories. Maybe you can give the list. thanks.