Web Directories future, or no future

It not competes with me, but it has hundreds almost exact (offering same services) websites on the same page.
If all your traffic relay on particular directory, what will happen to your website if this directory going down, or making changes that will cause drop in your traffic.
I prefer to get traffic from SE, because it has bigger potential to grow and it pays more. What I mean by that? There are plenty affiliate programs on the market which pay for clicks on ads, shown only for for visitors coming from SE, and shown ads relevant to the search term. If your traffic is not from SE, you not getting paid, actually ads just not shown.

As I see there are 2 models:
1) SE->DIR->SITE
2) SE->SITE
I prefer option 2, without mediator in between.

On my highly visited websites, here is what I have (and I like it):
google 85.70%
yahoo 8.85%
bing 3.84%
search 0.90%
ask 0.40%
and rest are referrals ...

This one with traffic from buyitcanada (actually recently that website receives more from SE - good job to me)
google / organic 49.57%
buyitcanada.com / referral 24.21%
(direct) / (none) 8.42%
yahoo / organic 6.22%
bing / organic 3.64%

Right now, my dependency on single source is 25% (it was 80% before). If something going wrong with this referral, I will loose 25% of my visitors.

 

If 99.69% of my traffic was coming from search engines, I would be very worried about the future of my site. To me, those numbers imply few sites are linking to yours and whatever rankings you have now would seem precarious.

What affiliate programs only display ads if a site visitor comes from a search engine?

 

Chitika and Chango

 

Having good anchor text in quality directories related to your niche is always a positive thing imo.

 

WEB directories used to be sources for traffic, but today they are tools for tricking PR. That caused WEB directories to be less trusted for SEs as it was before. In addition big percentage of data in Web directories is duplicate and will not be indexed and counted by SEs.

 

How can any search engine consider it as a quality directory when it's primary purpose is to manipulate search engine rankings? I don't see where "good anchor text" and "quality directory" are related? Can you provide some examples?

 

Isn't the purpose of search engines also to manipulate search engine rankings? They're in the pay per click business after all.

Ok, ok, you wanted an example, I can't think if actual ones off hand so allow me to explain what I meant.

There are many different types of directories, and they are not all created equal. One the one hand you have thousands of rickedy phpld sites with names like
www.001coolseodirectory.info, full of unranked subpages, slyly placed adsense and the most incomprehensible captchas imaginable. Ones created solely to make money, rather than provide any useful information. As a result Google and the other main search engines don't generally bother with them much.

On the other hand just because a site is a directory doesn't automatically mean it can't still be a great resource. There are plenty of strong, established directories out there which are still considered authority sites, though admittedly they are in the minority.

To explain what I mean we'll take a fictional directory "Springfield Town Directory"
The directory is part of the official Springfield town website. It is a free, human edited directory and it only accepts quality submissions related to Springfield.
Because it doesn't sell links, and because it only accepts quality, relevant links, and because it's an established site which has been around for six years and has lots of high PR links from other quality sites, (for example a Wikipedia link or a few .gov or .edu links) it's considered an authority site.

Now, let's take the following entry:

Title: Uncle Moe's Family Restaurant
URL: http://www.moe'stavern.biz
Desc: If you like great prices, good ole' fashioned cooking and loads of crazy crap on the walls come to Uncle Moe's Family Feedbag.
Category: Bars & Restaurants

Now, let's say Moe gets listed, the resultant page might look something like this:

<title>Bars and Restaurants in Springfield USA</a>
etc.
<h1>Restaurants in Springfield</h1>
<span><a href = "http://www.moe'stavern.com">Uncle Moe's Family Restaurant</a></span><br />
<span>If you like great prices, good ole fashioned cooking and....</span>

Google will see a high-ranked page on a trusted site with "Restaurants in Springfield" in the title and header tags and related keywords in the text as well as the anchor text as above. Such a listing would invariably help Moe rank much better for searches such as "Restaurants in Springfield".

This is what I meant by having desired anchor text in quality, relevant niche directories. One link from a directory like that is worth 200 from here today-gone tomorrow pay directories.

 

#1: Don't rely on directories to build links. If and when you submit your site to directories, make sure the directory is of high quality. If the directory is full of advertisements, you are wasting your time. SEO is much more diverse now. More about content, uniqueness and public relations.

 

CancerCharity, you have good point there, but I don't agree with your statement about advertising. Any website requires some kind of ongoing expenses. This is not charity to run it for free. You have 2 options:
1) no free inclusions
2) free inclusions, but with advertising

 

A high quality directory will ALWAYS be a source for traffic. The directory owners who have built a resource rather than a "directory" are providing so much more than PR to their submitters. Building that resource includes ensuring that the descriptions are not duplicated from the submitted site or posted on other directories. And trust me, duplicate content is indexed and counted - one of my articles is constantly being scraped and republished without my permission yet appears in the SERPs.

Traffic from directories isn't purely a numbers game. A professional directory sends my writing business website only a handful of visitors a year but virtually every one of them has emailed me about their project and/or became a client. The difference from that directory and all of the people that Google sends me is that 100% of the people coming from that business directory are looking to hire a writer. In other words, the directory is sending "highly targeted" traffic. If I could find a few more directories or other sites that would lead to such high conversion rates, I really wouldn't give two hoots how many folks came from the search engines - I'd have more work than I'd know what to do with.

 

I assume here you are referring to a specific niche directory. Yes, these kind of directories still useful. As I stated in my previous posts in this thread, one of my websites receives big % of it's visitors from one particular directory and not from SE. You made good point of potential of those visitors. May be the likelihood to make business with such visitors is higher than with visitors from SE.
About duplicate content, yes, it is indexed, but has high risk of being removed from the index. And, there is chance that your site (which actually had original content), will be removed from the index as duplicate.

None of us actually doing that, but it could be a good idea to put another field (or drop-down list) as part of directory submission form, to get the reason why webmaster decided to use your directory. I'm sure, the majority will answer to increase PR, then get his website indexed on Google and only then to generate traffic.