Are Directory Links Still Effective for your Website?
Lots of Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing Professionals are voicing their opinions and stating than directories and directory links are dead. Remember, these are the people that also say that Page Rank is dead, SEO is dead, and the latest this is dead theory. So, is website directory link building no longer worthy for your business?
I believe the real issue with website directory links is that only some of them are good, while some others are junk, and being able to tell this difference is the key between loosing your time and having a fruitful link building campaign. How can you tell if a directory is good enough for your website or that you should pass it? Here are the 3 main criteria of identifying a good directory from a bad one:
- You can find the directory in the most popular search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. Also the category pages of the directory are cached on the search engines, if the directory offers detail pages, these should be as well.
- Check the source code of the pages of the directory. Look to see if the links are plain a href’s, without the rel=”nofollow” attribute, and no sneaky redirects are present. By validating all these you guarantee that these links are seeing and counted by Search Engines.
- The directory doesn’t link to questionable websites, specially topics like gambling, casino adult, and illegal content websites. Be very wary about directory that offers sitewide likes to these type of sites.
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