When working on SEO for your website, you may have considered submitting your site to directories. There are thousands of directories out there and new ones staring every day, so many webmasters think this is an easy way of getting one-way links back to their website.
It is not that simple, however. Many of these directories do not have any page-rank to begin with and they have thousands and thousands of listings with many new listings added every day. The chance that you will receive any link juice from these directories is close to zero. Many of these directories use dynamic pages, which are harder for Google and other search engines to index. In addition, to search engines, these directories appear nothing more than “free” link farms and your link may not even contribute to any PR for your own website.
What’s more, is that some of these directories are attempting to steal your page-rank or even hijack your pages. Directories to avoid are the ones that have a “more” or “additional info” link at the bottom of each listing. It is this link that will take away page-rank from your site. When you manually submit your pages to directories (=waste of your time) you may be able to spot these “rogue” directories, but when you use any of the popular directory submission software, you may not realize that you’re submitting to a bad directory.
There are a number of directory submission services out there that may offer better results than when you do it yourself, but in my experience, I haven’t seen much results from these either.
So is there any directory that is worth submitting to?
The DMOZ directory used to be very popular. As of late is seems that they’re so behind in their editing of listings, that your chance of being accepted is close to nil. That leaves only 1 directory to submit to and that is the Yahoo Directory. With high page-rank and individual listings for almost every country, the Yahoo directory is in my opinion the only directory that is worth submitting to. The only downside is that it will set you back about $300 a year, but it’s worth it.
