March 05 2009
Web Directories Roles in Link Building are Reduced?
Tagged Under : bid directories, duplicate content, link building, search engine result page, SERP, web directories
Forums discussions in the past few month tell us a trend (or more accurate, a global assumption) that web directories’ roles in link building are reduced in importance by the Big G.
Some claim that web directory submission is worthless, as plenty of duplicates exist in multiple locations. They further claim that Google will penalise sites that submit to web directories.
Is that true? NO.
While the quality of web directories determine the usefulness of your submission, submitting your sites to directories are still beneficial, albeit weighted.
You shouldn’t worry about duplicate contents by having your site submitted to hundreds, if not thousands, of web directories.
Why? Because the myth has been around for too long - duplicate contents harm you IF you have them in the same domain or web page of yours.
For example, if you wish you can trick Big G into rank your site higher in search engine result pages (SERPs), think again - Some people ’stuff’ their site or web page with keywords or keywords-filled articles that results in duplicated content - this WILL make Big G penalises you, for sure.
But, for example, if you have your site’s detail all over the web directories, I learn from some others that Big G will weight the listing according to the importance of the web directories in the eye of Google. For example, your listing in DMOZ is viewed as more important than your listing in Best of The Web (BOTW); yours in BOTW are viewed as more important than yours in my Camrosecs.com.
Of course, get your site listed in DMOZ costs you nothing but very, very hard to achieve, and have yours listed in BOTW costs hundreds of dollars per year (in Camrosecs.com, your listing is free and no-hassle - as long as yours are of good quality!) - so, the higher the quality of the web directories, the more difficult or costly to get your sites listed in them.
What about bid directories? Again, pros and cons here - but I think bid directories are doing a good job helping sites listed higher in SERPs. Despite the negative reputation bid directories have - partly because many of them are built upon dropped or purchased domain names that have high(er) PageRank.
If the bid directories are built well, they can certainly help your sites to rank well - us bid directory owners are taking big risks in SEOing and link building ours, and we do this for a reason - because listed in bid directories are STILL very useful.
So, to conclude - web directories’ roles in link building are still big, although I can sense that Big G weighs the significance based on the quality of the web directories. Nevertheless, duplicated content is not an issue here, and web directories and web directories submission services are here to stay!
Popularity: 86% [?]
Here’s an interesting update from SitePoint Marketplace - DirectoryRate.com, one of the authorities in web directories, is listed for sale on Sitepoint.
