The question keeps being asked on this forum: "What is SEO-friendly?" When people refer to a directory as "SEO friendly" what they actually mean is that this particular directory does not use redirects, jump links, or no follow tags. How do can you determine whether a directory uses these quickly? Here's how: REDIRECTS/JUMP LINKS The main thing to being search engine friendly is NOT having redirects. In other words, make sure you are providing me with a direct link to my site. for instance: (1) http://www.mysite.com (good) (2) http://www.directory.com/dir.cgi?id=1431434817612. (very bad) Redirects won't count as a backlink in search engines, after all, the directory is not actually linking to YOUR site. To check a directory to see if it's using redirect links, simply place your mouse over a few listings. If the status bar in your browser shows a url that belongs to the directory (like ex. 2 above), then the link is a redirect, and being listed is of no value. One word of caution. I have found a couple directories in the past that use redirects, but use javascript to deceptively show you your address in the status bar, to make you think it's SEO-friendly. NOFOLLOW TAGS Nofollow tags tell search engine spiders to ignore your link, rendering the directory practically worthless to be listed in. To check for nofollow tags: (1) Check the robots.txt file to see if spiders are not disallowed from crawling the pages where the listings are shown. (2) Check the meta tags of listings page to make sure that spiders are not prevented from indexing the page. Ex: meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow". If it says noindex or nofollow, then don't bother submitting. (3) Check a few typical links for the anchor tag contains rel="nofollow". If present, then your link won't be followed by search engine spiders. (4) THE EASIEST WAY TO CHECK for nofollow is for Firefox users. Download this really nice extension from this page. It includes many useful features for webmasters including an option to highlight all NOFOLLOW links on a page. MOD REWRITE Another good idea for a directory is having mod rewrite, although not as big a sin as redirects and nofollow tags, still a good idea. What is mod rewrite? It's changing a directory structure that looks something like this #1 below, into #2: (1) http://www.directory.com/cat.php?id=234. (not as good) (2) http://www.directory.com/Computers/Internet/Forums (better)
PP said all i would have to say, but in brief: http://www.qango.com > Not SEO Friendly (look at the outbound URLs for each links and you'll see what i mean) http://www.portprophecy.com > SEO Friendly http://www.themostexpensivedirectory.com > We don't know cause no links there