There are lot of good directories and even more bad ones. I have accumulated a list of factors that can be used to identify a good directory. Ideally, the site you pay for should have many of these qualities, especially for general directories. 1. Directory Age. Choose a well-established directory. 2. Search engine friendly. 3. Human edited. 4. Well indexed in the major search engines (especially Google). 5. Unique IP. Avoid large networks. 6. Good search rankings. 7. Original categories. 8. Good PR. Higher is not always better. 9. Original content. 10. Well designed categories. 11. Your listing page is accessible. 12. Reasonable traffic. Alexa should be in line with PR. 13. Clean SEO techniques. White hat only. 14. Contact information available. 15. Site maintained regularly. See the complete article with explanations of the factors: Top 15 factors in selecting a paid directory Added Dec 15th: Once you have an idea of the quality of the directory you have to decide if the value of the listing is worth the price of the listing. I would appreciate hearing your comments.
As this is about paying for review I think the money aspect is important. There's excellent directories which fulfill the above criteria, but is the price commensurate to the benefit of a listing, and if the submitted site is not listed will the review fee be refunded?
Very good points. I completely left out money from the equation. It is true that if you take into account everything else, you have to ensure that the price is commensurate to the benefit of the listing.
Established Directory Age for me is the most important, so I'm glad you placed it at #1 (It's actually how our Top 100 is primarily ranked). If you are spending money on a review, then gaining that listing, you want it to be around for a long time. If the directory is here today, gone tomorrow, then the other 14 points don't matter at all. I think you were being generous saying that 3 years is a good established age. Normally I would agree, but there's a reason why I think it should be 5 years minimum. My reason for this is that a directory that has been around since 2006, will have also weathered the Google takedown in October 2007, and if it has survived that and still continues strongly then it's proven and established IMO. Once that is taken into account, the other 14 factors become much more important. Because we both know anyone can buy a dropped domain loaded with PR and high alexa, and it isn't the same thing. edit: Also with point #3, I think the explanation needs to be expanded. Many directory owners simply say "my directory is human edited" which isn't good enough because 99% of them aren't. To find out if a directory is human edited the submitter needs to peruse through their listings/content which goes hand-in-hand with points 7, 9 and 10.
I find the so called "human edited" factor very interesting, can anyone shed light on what that means? Most directories (including the so call human edited) tend to either accept or reject a submission, they don't actually spend time "editing" poor grammar or other stuff that can be edited if the info the submitter provided is in adequate or incorrect. Perhaps by human edited you mean the accept or reject button is clicked by a person rather than being done by a script?
I think it should be mentioned that a good directory would usually have a unique, custom web design that comes with it. Because most of the lousy directories I've found are using cookie-cutter templates or free ones which are very commonly used.
It's pretty easy to detect a human edited directory really. Look at the latest links page. If you see titles that consist of only anchor text and the descriptions are full of repetitive keywords then the directory is NOT human edited. Human edited directories will almost always adhere to their published guidelines. If they state that the Title must be the name of the website or be URL based then that is what you should see on the latest links page - not anchor text. Google's guidelines for directories state that an anchor text filled directory is downgraded because it is easily identified as not being human edited.
Two basic types of directories. For simplification, I'll call them good and bad. I tend to hold paid directories to a higher standard. The owners of good directories spend time and money creating a useful site. The owners of bad directories slap something together in minutes using widely available free resources. If it works they keep it. If it doesn't work they get rid of it. 1. Search engine friendly URLs 2. Directory Age - Choose a well-established directory. There are no set rules, but in my opinion a paid site should have existed as a directory for at least 3 years. Beware of dropped domains that may lose their PageRank in the next couple of updates. Search engines give more value to older sites. Age is not everything, but since there are so many paid directories to choose from you should start your search with the well-established sites. A directory that has been around for 5 years is likely to be around for another 5 years. A site like archive.org can provide with a good history of a site. 3. Unique IP - Avoid networks of directories hosted on the same IP or the same IP class. Ideally you will have links from a diverse list of IPs. 4. Human edited 5. Well indexed. 6. Good search rankings. 7. Original categories. 8. Good PageRank. Higher is not always better. 9. Original content. 10. Well designed categories. 11. Your listing page is accessible. 12. Reasonable traffic 13. Clean SEO techniques. 14. Site maintained. 15. Contact information available.
I think you need to qualify what is meant by good PR. To me if the homepage has visible PR and none of the top level or even second level categories do, it's not a good directory. If all the PR score is on the homepage that tells me that the directory owner is doing little, if any, promotion of the categories.
I wish to thank everyone for reading the whole article and providing extremely useful comments. silencer: I agree with your comments about age. A 5-year old directory would definitely be better. silencer, temi, boblord666: Yes when I say a directory is "human edited" I mean that the listings are actively modified when required. A directory stating that they are "human edited" doesn't give it anything. Renatus, maldives: Good point. I good design certainly is important. Unique is nice but in my opinion as long as a design it is not overly used. The free ones would not cut. it. YMC: Great point that I should clarify. A good directory should not point all it's PR to the homepage. A directory with PR in it's categories would be ranked higher.
Thank you for the advice and all who share and give more help, but don't you think ( A 5-year old directory would definitely be better.) is long time to trust the directory ! 3 years and more will be good to add a link. With the factors included in the thread.
I'd agree with temi that this term is overused and misleading, it can just mean somebody hits the 'Approve' button without looking at anything. Maybe 'edited to meet the submission requirements' (presuming there are any) would be better but then a lot of the submission rules are just copy/paste from another directory and not really focused on editorial integrity.
Great points! Just wanted to add one more critical point based on my experiment. Time taken to get details page indexed in Google and ability to retain those pages in Google index. I personally believe this is quite important factor on deciding a directory whether it is quality or not. When I started web directory, I had two simple philosophy. 1) Unique content policy - Every description of the listing added in my directory will have unique snippet of description. They wouldn't be the same in other directories neither it will be scrapped from articles. 2) Daily updates - Update at least 1 new listing in the directory on a daily basis. i.e., Show new content everyday Google crawls the site. What happens as a result of this? Google started to love my directory. Initially Google crawler used to visit my site every 1 week. This got reduced to every 2 days in just 2 weeks. Then it became every day. I mean any new listing got added in my directory, gets crawled in a day. Now the rate of content crawling is amazing. You wouldn't believe it. Now it is every few hours and some times it is every few minutes. I am surprised that Google crawler waits in the door step of my latest listing page and crawls content like crazy. One day I was adding 20 links to my directory. Every time I added a listing I kept checking every few minutes if it got crawled. To my surprise Google crawler was like a virtual agent sitting on my latest listing page and absorbed every listing in no time. When I completed adding 20 links, almost 18 links got crawled in a matter of few minutes. Amazing, isn't it ! I am not trying to hype myself, but this is my observation based on some of my experiments. I think it is because of unique content, Google crawler was acting like this. Just like BBC or Mashable, where the crawler literally stands on their home page to crawl newly published breaking news in no time. I am not sure about how other directories operate, but this is just my observation and I believe is one of the main factor to rate a directory.
Thank you for not putting pagerank as number one. Many people judge a directory by its pagerank and it is definitely not the most important factor in regards to the quality of a directory.
Very true. Surprisingly many SEO companies (regular submitters) still consider PR as one of the major factor unfortunately.
My opinion is every top web directory has more google index. This is very important factor for web directory submission it works so far for obtain search engine ranking.