How has Google benefited from directories?

As you think back to the days when Yahoo was primarily a directory, to DMOZ, and the many other directories of categorized, human edit links over the years, could the case be made that Google received virtually millions of man hours of free help to build their search database?

For a many years, Google encouraged people to submit to directories, and people who did this benefited in the Google search results. Did Google use directory editors as a free way to screen submitters for a long time?

 

The thing went wrong with directory is that they designed it for submission not for usage.. A good directory should be usable along with submission

 

It is no secret that googles db was primarily comprised of odp data originally. Now? Who knows. If you are suggesting that google has been scraping directories, I guess I'd have to submit that google has been scraping content from everyone for years. Just one look at the image db is evidence of this. Any other site would have been sued by getty many times over for harvesting and publishing a database of imagery. That's just one example.

 

I am just suggesting that google owes quite a bit to directories for categorizing and finding all these links in the first place.their new strategy with disavow has made it where they have a new army of people who are freely giving their services to show Google which links they think are the bad ones. In some cases they even make them contact the bad ones and tell them to remove their link.it probably wouldn't be a big shocker to find out that much of Google is human edited as a result of what they scraped and how they organized is such a way that people were human editing on the behalf of Google.

 

What google owes to the internet as a whole is living up to their motto. We'll all be here long after they are gone

 

The realistic importance of directories died 12-14 years ago.

In some ways I do think google uses/used directories to screen sites but it was probably a very small piece of the equation, which was basically tied to backlinks. Would a worthless site spend $600 of directory listings ? Probably not. If they would spend $600 on directory links they would probably spend a decent amount on content.

As far as google building the the foundation of their search engine from the categories of directories I seriously doubt it has made any kind of benefit for google or any other search engine.

Directory owners who think they did the world or google a favor are delusional. All they did is try to make money from a internet trend that is now gone.

 

^ 12 - 14 years would pretty much predate most directories... I think your assertion here is flawed. I've spent almost 20 years looking at web logs and in that time have noticed the overwhelming number of referring sites tend to be directory related, primarily those web sites that people PAY to list in... Whether it be a yahoo directory, yelp, or some generic directory, that's where the influx of referring traffic comes from time and time again.

 

I am talking about useful directories. Useful to the general public not site owners and seo guys.

In the late 90s the internet was becoming main stream, had a lot of users and search engines sucked. When you did a search you got porn pop ups, irrelevant websites and other such junk. So people started making “link pages” they would find a nice collection of websites and post them, they were awesome like little gem collections. These grew into sites full of links aka-”directories”.

At this point search engines still were not giving very good results so when you stumbled on a “link page” or a “directory” you book marked it, they were useful- they saved you hours or weeding through trash search results. This was 1995-1998

Shortly after 1999-2001 yahoo and other search engines started brining back relevant results there was no need for “link pages” or “directory”. After this “link pages” became a place for backlink juice and the same with directories the usefulness for the general public was over.

 

2001 Google was still giving porno results for at least some technology-related phrases. Trust me, I remember one incident vividly, along with the timeline.

When I launched my directories around 2006-2007, both niches were still yielding over-SEO'ed, irrelevant and un-informative sites. A lot of times, they still do. The results are generally better but niche directories and "link lists" still provide better results - at least the ones who are picky about what sites they include.

I have a client, where in his industry, the directories are outranking most of the actual sites. His wife's business is much the same. They are almost forced to submit their websites to industry directories in order to be competitive. So, I know, G is still ranking some directories well and that there's money to be made from them.

I still use link pages. On some sites, they have more useful information than the rest of the site.

 

I still think your history (dates) are a few years off here.

I don't recall Lycos, Webcrawler, AOL, AltaVista and other's being full of porn pop ups... We both have a different recollection of the timeline and players.

Is what it is...

 

My dates could be off, I never was that accurate with dates.

I do remember being in web design school in in the late 90s and having pron pop ups take over the computer in the middle of class and having to shut it all down. it sucked and happened to someone at least once a day. Who knew "drop down menu" would bring up Sluts from Asia ..?

 

Hmm, now that I think about it, I don't ever remember getting such crap on the original search engines. It wasn't until we had the search engine who wanted to index every site on the web, that we had the false positives of the eye-popping kind.

 

Well, within that "timeline" Google came on the scene in 1998... So there you go!

 

If directory submission is pretty much useless now, how come this site: http://www.freelinksubmission.net/ and other similar sites still come up at the top if you type: directory submission? What good do they do?

 

Because Google does not care about the quality of site or the quality of the listing. They don't even care about the links or the manipulation some SEO's and Directories use to attempt to rank higher in SERPs. What they care about is whether a directory is charging your for it or not. That appears to be the common denominator. YMMV.

 

I don't think it's all about not charging a fee. I have a client who works in a niche where the SERPs are virtually dominated by directories, almost all of which are paid. It borders on extortion. They list the non-participating companies as having nothing to sell...think hotel listing that states a hotel is fully booked or a used car dealership listing that said the company didn't currently have any cars for sale. Great scam and Google continues to favor these directories over the sites of the companies listed.

 

Sorry, but I have another opinion. I have never ever paid necessarily to be listed and tried to avoid those "Pay me $5 and I'll list you" directories. Those directories destroyed the industry. A web directory should be a resource for it's users, something to facilitate finding a specific niche website (plumbers in London are for example). The web directory owner basically vouch for what he's adding into his web directory. He should clean and update his DB from time to time. Oh, and time is money like in any other industry... you can't spend all your time surfing the Internet for great resources, access tons of submissions and open each and every one of them, decide what gets in and what gets rejected... for FREE. So, a suggestion fee is suggestion fee is not equivalent with "guarantee of acceptance," rather someone's time and effort is paid, as long as we talk about decent fees.

My 2 cents.

 

I guess I don't understand. You're saying do not charge, but you should be compensated so ask people to donate? You've lost me.

 

I think I expressed wrongly what I meant.

When I suggest a website to a paid directory, even if there is a review fee, I pay it if I consider that directory good enough and spam free. But when I do so, I like to think I paid someone's time and effort to open my website and decide if it worth listing it or not. I am not expecting someone to do charity work ans stay in front of a PC 24/7 "for a better Internet".

The best example is Yahoo. They charge you $299 to REVIEW your website, and even if they won't include you in their directory, they won't refund you. It's like a consultancy fee.

The current fee for Yahoo Directory Submit for initial consideration in the Directory is a NON-REFUNDABLE fee of US $299.00

Source: https://info.yahoo.com/legal/us/yahoo/directorysubmit/directorysubmit-159.html



The vast majority of webmasters consider paying $20 (or whatever) = "guarantee of acceptance" - which, in my opinion, is wrong. But the industry shaped itself into that direction since people used to pick up expired domains, install some directory script with dummy DB and ofter scrapping other directories... and voila... in 1 week they had PR7 web directories which were advertised as "Yuhuuu... PR7... submit now... I accept every trash!!!!"