I just don't get it.. Do directorys actually get human eyes? i don't see the point of running one, but there seem to be as many directory webamsters as there are proxy webmasters. Is it just for the seo benefits? IMO google will make that obsolete in time anyway. plus social bookmarking seems to have more benefit. How do all these people monetize there directories? i guess im looking for someone to flip the "duh" light switch for me b/c i just don't get it..
Good directories do make money... and as far as SEO goes, it has and still will hold value...Social bookmarking is just part of SEO...just as directory submission is. It all depends on the quality of the site you have a link from, be it a directory or a social networking site...A crap directory would not give you anything but a crap link, much as a link from a crap SB site has no value.
so all these directory owners I read about here on dp are mostly wasting bits? Do people actually browse sites like dmoz? or just crawlers?
I cant speak for other directory owners but all "new high pr (soon to drop!) silly domain directory owner"s are probably wasting their time and submitters' time too. There are high traffic directories and yes sites are often browsed in those. But most of those directories do more than just listing sites...(blog, gallery, articles, forums, webmaster tools etc...)
I see what your saying. A directory may be specialized as in say a list of technology blogs or healthcare related forums ect. instead of a random listing of sites like most. Thanks! +rep
I get most of my visitors from directories that I submitted my blog into. Twitter has only gotten me 35 visits this month even though my following are growing and are related to my niche. "My friends" at Facebook aren't visiting as much, Digg, well forget about it. Search engines What can I say, I'm one of them that wont go past page 2, if the best of sites I'm looking for are in the page 3 and under, then I'm losing out. Directories Not all are created equal, most just sits there waiting to make money, while others work on it to make it better and actually offer something useful. A directory like DMOZ offers a lot and I'm sure they get a lot of visitors, I myself visit it on a daily basis to find information that I'm looking for. When search engines fail, I go to dmoz or wikipedia for answer. My blogs are ranking pretty good on the search engines beating out the more popular sites that have been around for sometimes and considering they have a much higher PR than my blog. I subscribe to Google News for that certain popular keywords, example: Honolulu. My post is listed within one hour after creating that post every time, thanks to the submissions to web directories. There are many ways to get your sites notice, web directories is one of them and it should not be considered to be the only source. Don't waist time on a directory that wont get you any weight, it's a waist of time. So choose wisely. Do directories work? Absolutely and I will bet my left nut on it.
Quality niche directories get repeat visitors and also get a lot of search engine traffic (75 to 85% of the hits to the site). Some of the better known general directories also have a following. However, as you stated a lot of the following occurs because the searcher couldn't find what they were looking for on google...which diminishes over time because the link from this directory makes the sites in that directory find their way to the first page in google. Most directories get almost no search engine traffic or repeat visitors at all. So the key is to find directories that actually get good traffic from users (not just webmasters looking for a link) and get listed there. Those type of directories will give you a little traffic and will give you a huge lift in the SERPs.
Believe it or not but people actually do browse the directories however, the SEO benefit is probably the most important here.
This is what I wanted to say, Directories' goal is to get traffic from search engine, and when they do then they earn from their ads(monetizing starts).
Rubbish... According to Alexa we’re getting only 2.4% from SE, which means 97.6% of our traffic is coming from 20,000 backlinks to our site including directories of course. Given that we ranked 23,000 by Alexa, it is clear that at list our directory will be doing very well even if we will get 0% traffic from SE fastreplies