What future for directories ? Can directories survive Panda ?

HelloJust wanted to know if you still believe in directories.Search engines do no seem to like directories a lot and lot of them have drown in serp since Panda.1 - Do you still believe in directories ?2 - Has your directory been splapped by Panda ?3 - What should a directory look like to be successfull nowday Let's see if we can wrap up some ideas to improve our directories ! I ll sum it up somewhere tks !

 

Wel i can say directories will be always there b/c when big search engines are there SEO is there and when SEO is there Directories will always live.
as for as panda is concerned being dir owner i would say that let it be more tough because people really spend a huge amount of $$$$ on SEO so it is good that they get good results from dir submissions.

 

hello frosensharkyour directories draws as many visitors ad before Panda?

 

Panda was about weak content. If a directory had weak content, it suffered after Panda. If a directory had good categorization and unique descriptions, it did fine or even saw more traffic. Same impact it had on every site. But, as a French SEO expert, you should already know that.

 

i know directories should have more editorial content, include social networks, have no duplicate content, insert local content. This said, directories with lot of unique content, like webrankinfo and others who are really selective had a 55% loss after panda. My point here was to open a discussion on experiences, not to start shooting at each others ...

 

schlogo yes the traffic is affected a bit but google still cares for my indexing ,keywords and pr that is awl wt a dir owner want

 

Your initial post seemed like so many others by SEO gurus in disguise that are a blatant attempt to either garner information for an unflattering article or promote their services. I hope you can understand my initial reaction to your post.

Panda was quite good to all of my sites - directory and otherwise. They all either increased in traffic or remained pretty much where they were.

My directories are both niche and relatively small. Even within the niches, I don't accept a lot of stuff. If the submitted site is full of article directory content or other similarly useless junk, I don't accept it, even if on topic. For the past 13 months, I've been doing a lot more auditing of the listings. Change of focus, domained site or abandoned shops are removed. I'm constantly adding subcategories as a category gets too large or starts getting too many different aspects of a similar topic.

I know you didn't ask for a review, but since you brought it up as an example...I took a random description from the artists category of the directory you mentioned and put it into Google.com. Using the original French and the Google English translation, it found no matches. It also includes painters, musicians, writers, graphic artists and a web radio station - with the exception of the radio station, they are all artists but certainly something you should consider separating. You might also want to try to figure out why the pages are not being indexed well. The first thing that jumps out at me is that there are no meta tags being used. While it's good that it has category descriptions, they appear to all be the same.

 

( Can directories survive Panda ? )
Yes they will . why !
Search engines and directories are twin
Good directory includes quality useful information will never be effect .

 

It's ok, tks for your long answer, it brings some answer. I can see that some of us still believe in directories

 

I think that general directories might be in troubles. Niche directories might keep doing well is like YMC does, we care about the quality of entries. Uniqueness and quality of content might be something to look at has well. I guess the directory might have to offer services to the visitor (contact form etc, search box etc... )

 

There are lot of directories which emphasize more on "backlinks" ,"page rank" rather than proper categorization, useful content. I think they suffered the most of PANDA

 

I think what will kill a lot of directories is the death of PR. Many people just don't care about traffic, quality, age, etc just that little green bar.

 

Death of PR is not for tomorrow

 

never know one day google could just take it away over night. it is noting to most people and wouldn't even be missed by 99.9% of the population.

 

They might be using is themselves It would be tricky to remove it , at least for now

 

About as tricky as removing the +1, the yellow star, Alexa A, S similar sites, really PR is nothing, just a little tab and you have to download a app to see it except for a few SEO guys and people buying and selling links no one cares. PR has also created an industry full of scammers, dropped domains, redirects, and other nickel dime tricks, it would not hurt google a bit it would actually be like getting rid of some annoying bugs.

I bring up PR because a large amount of directories are completely worthless but they stay alive because of that little green tab. Other then the little green tab They have nothing. No traffic, no content, nothing.. just a link farm.
So will Panda affect these directories? They don't get traffic to begin with, they will still have to drop links in DP and other little schemes they use to get traffic. So I doubt Panda has any affect on them they have no content and Panda is about content.

Niche directories on the other hand will get more traffic if they have decent content. Pandas about getting poor content out of the ay so real content can rank and it seems to be working some so far.

 

Your opinion on directories is right, lot of them are just link farms and have no interest for users...

 

I think you can still use directoies, but just limit to few and important ones.

 

I desagree, big directories will be direct competitors of Google and yellow pages.... they are hard to maintain, don t you think niche directories only have a chance?

 

I believe its not about directories basically it is about content that how weaker content you are putting in directories so still if you put unique, compelling and informative content then definitely it is gonna boost your website ranking.