and i would say : NO, i found them useless, because, your link will be somewhere....., there PR or importance for google will be zero. yes it will seat in the same place with the rest of the links in the same "theme", thats all. would it bring traffic ? No, I get traffic from Dmoz, not much but few clicks a day. Don't spend all that time on adding and paying to put your link in some useless directories., just find few with very high PR, like Dmoz, Yahoo, Botw, where you link will get both PR and some traffic. In reality the rest of the directories, they just unknown to regular people and they will not bring to you traffic and PR. You want to get a good links to your page: buy them and be smart about it. do slow and do not over do it. Google wants to know, if those links are done natural. better buy 1 PR6 than few of lower PR links. don't waste your money on anything less than PR5
Thousands of people come to my directories every month via web searches. So apparently Google, Yahoo, Live and others think my directories are valuable for common internet users. This is proof (in my opinion) that directories are useful for more than just webmasters getting backlinks.
hey, thesmeghead, when you type any simple keywords in google, yahoo, etc, there is no directories comes up, only real websites with real power, real value. you should check it out where you getting your traffic. possible, from the same people, who wants to add they site to your directory. because of the structure of most of the directories, most of the links got lost in that directory, due to being in the deep deep link structure of the directory. wanna supply sample in google for which keywords , and i am meaning real keywords we can all get to your sub pages or main page and find valuable info.
You are right; simple keyword searches return obvious pages. But thousands of people do come to my busy directories - this is tracked by cpanel statistics, so I know where they are coming from and even how many come from which search engine. Those people are doing so called "long tail" searches, definitely not simple keywords. They come to my directories and often end up clicking on the listed directory links. Here are stats for this month from one directory:
According to me, some of the popular directories like Dmoz, yahoo directory and others definitely helps people who are looking for best sites. Submitting sites to directory helps its owner to rank well in search engines. Google, somehow loves quality sites submitted in directories and count backlink from them. So, do it at regular interval to get good result.
great observation: long tail keywords= less important sites, 1 keyword = high or very important sites. no need to do explantion, hope you understand. my personal issue with directories, that they are just waste of the time for both parties. but it's my own view.