Are Directories Good or Bad for SEO?

I want the lowdown here. I am hearing from a couple of my SEO colleagues that Directories, other than DMOZ and those big ones like it are not good for SEO....why? What's the difference between a link farm and a directory?

Can someone clear this up?

 

Ask your seo colleagues if they are still using directories themselves and if they say no then ask them what alternatives they use.

A link farm to me can be an FFA site, a links page on any website that has 100, 200 links on that page, especially if they are not sorted and quite random.

I guess a social bookmarking site could be called a link farm.

A network of blogs setup for selling links is a collective link farm.

Theres quite a few varieties of link farms.

http://www.pulsedirectory.com/ <-- my directory is a general directory, it has categories, rules, guidelines, restrictions, some sites are not allowed, its edited, maintained.....

 

To me, it comes down to care and maintenance. It takes me about twenty seconds to determine if a link directory is worth submitting to.

The best — and really only — criteria to live by, in my opinion — would a human visitor find the directory useful, ie its content, its look, its layout.

But that's just my opinion. That and $1 will get you a cup of coffee

 

Mikey - just because you no longer run a general directory does not make them all useless.

There are good and bad general directories just like there are good and bad niche directories.

 

Agreed — and while I run a general directory — I would take a well run general directory over a poorly managed niche directory any day.

 

Much misconception about directories these days. Most fail to deliver enough traffic and many deliver only a few clicks per year eg 20 visitors per website listed. Many now make the listings worthless by removing all SEO benefits eg: not allowing pages to be spidered, thus pages won't get indexed and webmasters won't show up in serps.

It's done to cut down free promotion advantage taken by link hunters and PR manipulators, and to be honest I don't blame directories for doing this, infact we now do it ourselves.

Things will get worse before they get better.

 

@OP: Directory submission is useful for SEO, you can get a website with decent competition ranked on first page with some on page SEO and directory submissions.

@Mikey: Are you sure you want to stick to that stand against general directories. I am sure you earn a decent sum by running that directory submission service to 'general directories'

 

Lmao bang bang, argh my foot, hehe

 

To be fair, Mikey wrote that:

He doesn't imply that general directories are in theory useless — just that there are a lot of poorly run or neglected general directories about. Moreover, submitting to them isn't going to help you out.

Nobody can argue with that.

 

And because their neglected, they aren't maintained, promoted or developed - so it makes them useless in the end.

Like a scrapped Motor Car, with no way to get it going again. Forgotten about and by that time people have moved on to other modes of transport.

 

Find out for yourself, that's the best thing you can do.

 

Thats an easy question...ofcourse they are Good,but you have to know a little bit of seo so you can find the directories that will benefit your site....

 

If you know how you can get best from it, then its good for sure .

 

Reputation means alot. You will find it almost impossible to revoke bad will toward your site if you assosciate with bad link farms. Start at the top ..DMOZ etc..and stay as near to it as possible with all your directory submissions.
Don't go for the quick ..cheap and nasty submissions.

 

Directories are not very powerful but yes still valuable for backlinks. A good directory contains good listing edited by human. These type of directories are worth including dmoz, joeant, skaffe, illumirate, etc. All are human-edited. Only dmoz allow to submit site. All other three, you have to join as editor. Some other good directories also but most of them are paid.

 

Directories are help you in seo for long time period! But you should select quality directories for this!

 

I strongly agree with this. I've used directories extensively for quite some time now, and it always gives me good results

 

Cant really strategically talk yourself out of that one its just too funny.