Do you think "ordinary people" read directories or are these places just flooded by people who submit their articles to the directory. If oridinary people do not read them then you do not get the kind of traffic you are looking for, do you?
Its a good question. webmasters use them for link-building. and that can indeed work if you get into the right category. whether anybody else notices if you're listed or not, is a different matter. but what matters is you get a backlink, right? again, if you submit properly, your site will be credited in search engines for it.
2 things Webmasters are people too, i do often visit site i see on other peoples directories, plus i visit sites submitted to my directories secondly, some directories generate truely massive traffic flows, from people who've found them useful in the past, an from advertising, okay, nothing like google, but I get more traffic from directories than i get from Ask.com every little bit counts, especially if they are buyers
QFT. Every little bit helps, and I'm pretty sure the backlink from a PR8 site like dmoz is more valuable in your google rankings than all of the traffic you will ever get from dmoz.
there are so many people that can´t even search on google...directories is for heavy users and link building...it´s very hard to get a good traffic from them
Directories and link building is the job of SEO and it is hard to get a good traffic but it depends on how you promote it to a middle class of users. We need to educate and teach them on how can search valuable information on the search engine.
I run a site for a construction equipment manufacturer. It's PR4 and it was registered over 10 years ago with no drops. It's been listed in DMOZ and Yahoo for almost all of that time. I just looked at google analytics and out of the last 20,000 uniques, not one person was reffered from dmoz or any of the other directories. There is no doubt that we wouldn't have the pagerank that we do without those directories, because we basically have done no online advertising. 48% of the site's traffic is type-in, so that might not be indicative of your typical site.
I guess directories are only for a pagerank and link building purposes. They don't actually attract any visitors directly to your website.
As an "ordinary" person I do not read directories, they catch my attention in very rare cases. I consider them as a webmaster's place mostly.
I used to run an adult site and when I decided to go strictly mainstream I turned it into a directory I don't check the stats like I do with other sites I own but have noticed traffic coming in looking for specific sites that go to there directory listing from different IP's so they get some traffic i guess from real people. I really don't pay too much attention though.
No i think its mainly webmasters. But a lot of people who are struggling to find sites on what they want. Or if a niche has like no sites but people are trying to find info, in rare cases they will search through directories to find them.
What defines a directory ? That's my question, I think the majority of us surf directories of some kind every day - we just don't consider them directories, because I was thinking the same thing the other day, then I made a concious decision to actually define the sites I was surfing daily and to my surprise there's actually quite a few (directories) that I visit daily. In my opinion a good directory is one that's not so obvious and doesn't scream directory.
That is a very good point! Come to think of it we do browse "directories." But I guess when I formulated my question I was refering to websites which do scream directories. And no I do not think we visit them. Good point though.
I found directories quite useful before Google came about. I haven't gone to a directory other than to submit for a looooong time. But that's besides the point. A link is an opportunity for traffic, regardless of where it is located.
Taking into account what you are saying (well, I myself do not visit directories as well) Google might as well change its algorithm in the nearest future so that the links from directories wouldn't count. Mark my word! Google guys keep telling us that they do strive for relevancy. The fact that you have a 1000 links from low-quality directories doesn't prove your site is relevant. So I suggest you still need to have a good back-up plan in case all this directory nonsense goes down the drain.
RELEVANT directories work for SEO and are read by people. e.g. I have a cat-related website, CatnipRanger.com. The links from a cat site directory provide a better rating at G than a general directory with a pet/cat section. The reasons are: there are actual readers of the directory AND the directory is selective in postings. Again, SEO is improved by relevant subject ties (links) making yout site what people want to find when they do a G search. Regards...
only webmasters visit directories, usually no ordinary people crawl it. their primary purpose is link building and they r doing it pretty well.