I keep finding these lists of directories, but then Im reading that not every directory is SEO friendly. Do you submit to all or just some of them?
If the directory is SEO friendly then it must have a good PR, Link popularity and it's better to be an old one like DMOZ. But I don't know still DMOZ live or not some people says now it's dead.
The directory should have SEO-friendly URLs and also does not have the rel=nofollow tag, then it should be fine
Depends how you look at seo friendly. Typically its usually as mentioned above, ie the sef urls, dofollow links etc etc. Ideally i think it would be even more seo friendly (take into account that reads as search engine optimised friendly, which doesn't actually sound correct) if every category and nearly all listed sites were indexed by the search engines. Quite often i see a brand new directory owner actually tell us that theirs is seo friendly and you typically check the urls and see that they are not. Im more selective now, out of the masses constantly appearing i guess that im submitting to about 10% of them now.
Right, but what if I submit my website to a not seo friendly directory? Is that going to harm my rankings on google?
Dofollow links with high PR is SEO friendly. You hardly find such "good" directories now a day. If one exist then you may have to pay for a good placement. And yes, there do exist DMoz directory to which getting the link listed is near to impossible.
pipes has a good take on it,... its how well the categories are structured , and how well are they indexed,... and if the details pages are actually coming up on search results when people search for sites. M.
Dont remember where but there was a discussion on whether or not a directory 'needs' to be SEO-friendly. I happen to judge it on whether the details page for your site in the directory gets indexed. May not be the best way to judge it though!
Another thing - a good directory is a directory with hand-picked quality sites, that do not advertise with SEO benefits. A directory is intended to be useful for users, not webmasters. Notice that the big, established directories do not advertise with SEO benefits.
Right but where did you find these directories which are not advertising with SEO, they just everywhere. I use a lot of sources like directorycritic.com and others, Every week there is a new list of directories on some websites and I submit my web to all of them That's why I was wondering if they all are like SEO friendly. But I think that they not