SEO Friendly Directory

How to judge that the particular directory is seo friendlty or not ?

 

I think what people refer to most of the time is the URL's...if they are something like

directory.php?&category=7&id=12

...that is not search engine friendly.

Now, if the URL's looks more like

/directory/webmaster_forums/webmasters_anonymous.htm

That is a good sign that the directory is search engine friendly. There is more to it than this of course, but that's usually a good indicator

 

This link from VileSilencer's site explains it very well:
http://info.vilesilencer.com/main.php?rock=redirects.php

 

Not only this, but check also how they link to you. Do they provide a direct link, or a re-direct of some kind?

Aaron

 

Thanks PortProphecy

 

I think it should be SE friendly and not SEO friendly.

SE friendly directories,
1) Static urls like http://www.indexbizz.com/cat1.html
2) No redirection , some directories use javascript redirection.
3) No banning of the SE bots throught robots.txt, some directories ban robots from crawling certain directories through instructions in robots.txt file.

 

by this standard most of the directory script is not SE friendly ?

 

Most of the off the shelf directory scripts do not have a SE friendly url format for categories. That does not mean that the pages of such directories will not be crawled. Of late i have noticed all the major SEs indexing dynamic urls in SERPs. But still , one would like to play safe and create static looking urls through various means like changing the script to generate the urls or through mod rewrite.

 

do check for redirections , it can harm you site

 

Yea, when people talk about SE friendly links, they are usually talking about the directory submissions listed being direct links, not redirects.

As far as the category structure of certain scripts being SE friendly, I've found that the big engines have no trouble crawling things link:
www.whatever.com/cat.php?id=34

I have one directory running the biz directory script without any mod rewrite, and Google has no troubles with it. See here:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site:www.portprophecy.com&btnG=Google+Search

My sites running PHPLD were up and running a couple of days before I enabled the mod rewrite on that script, and again, Google was able to crawl all the pages.

Heck, I've even found really long search strings (like that google link I posted above) showing up in results before. If they can handle a link like that, they can darn near handle anything.

 

Look at meta tag like this one in the head section:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOFOLLOW">

it means that the spider not follow the link contained in the page

 

Look for 2 things

1. Static URLs with no re-direct or nofollow. A spider has to be able to crawl the link.
2. Not a lot of links on one page. Less than 20 links is good.

 

Aside from checking the ending of the URL you could also go to google and do a "site:www.domain.com" command and verify that their pages are indexed and werne't dynamic

 

1. SEF URLs like www.site.com/cat1/subcat1.html not www.site.com/index.php?c=1
2. Direct outbound links, not redirect or uses "rel=nofollow" with links page. ( Should take a look at source code page after you submitted or exchanged link with some directory)
3. Not many links stick in one page, I don't think PR8 page with 500+ links is valuable enough for each link. (20 links per page is good imo)
4. All pages can be read thought by se bots or spiders. No orphan links (page that can't be reached by internal link)
5. For a large directory, sitemap is important. (sitemap.xml for our father, urllist.txt for yahoo and sitemap.html for general purpose)
6. Do not place too many featured links per one category. Imagine some directory that placed 30 featured links at first page in each category, what about each link value? and what about regular or reciprocal links.

Only my opinion