It is pretty clear that nowadays, google tends to give less weight to anchor text than it used to be. The bold factor to rank on google is to have an authority content web directory or web site.

How do we have an authority site?

How can a web site gets more weight even it has not that much backlinks? It’s about content and what kind of outbound links there are on your site. If you are likely to link to good organizations sites, government sites, informative sites etc etc… your site will have more weight. Theorically speaking, the more you give good outbound links on your site, the more you will be rewarded for that.

Linking to crap doesn’t help your site and your rankings on Google. Also you should be aware that webmasters who claims outbound links doesn’t help your google rankings are the kind of webmasters that list crap, so how can they know?

The truth about Directories

All directories except a few are crap, i explain. Why people on internet creates web directories?
– It’s one more site in my network
– It’s a good service for webmasters
– A good way to sell links and get a few bucks
– It helps the ranking of my other sites
– So on so forth…

They all forgot we build directories for 1 purpose only, having a good content to help users looking for what they are searching. Search engines do most of the job in that situation but Web Directories also helps them to find original content, the one you can’t see on Google or Yahoo.

No directory owners (just a few) takes time to manually add web sites to their directories, this is a waste of time i agree, but in the end if you have a directory that lists 30,000 good websites you look pretty and bold.

Adding sites also gives you more traffic to your directory, i’m totally sure most of the free-paid directories on internet doesn’t make it to 75 uniques a day. While IWD makes it to 500 a day nowadays with just 7000 sites listed.

What’s the real advantage of adding sites manually?

If you do so, your directory will be considered more important by search engines than when it listed crap. You suddenly appears on SERPs and get traffic.

Here is my little secret, when you do a web directory and add sites manually, you sometimes find some keywords niche. Directories are a way to rank for all kind of keywords (if it’s general directories of course). When you see traffic from some keywords, exploit it and create another website dedicated to it, get traffic and monetize.

Or try adwords and use overture like hell it’s another way to find good keywords.

If you are a directory owner, how long do you think your directory will last? If you think less than 2 years you already lost. Find a way to keep it alive forever and all the work you’ve pulled in will pay back.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 29th, 2006 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Directories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.