Dennis Watson over at the Internet Marketing and Advertising Tips blog has an article wondering if directories are still effective.

I think it depends on what you’re looking for. Every link can serve two purposes — the first is to build your PageRank with Google, and the second is to drive traffic. If you’re looking for traffic, any link with a site that complements yours is a good link.

If you’re looking for PageRank, it gets a little dicier. Here are some tips from the webmaster of the Offers and Deals directory:

A Lot of Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing Professionals are voicing their opinions and saying than directories are dead. But 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 directory link building no longer worthy? well only the Search Engines can tell you for sure.

I believe the real issue with directory links is that only some of them are good and worthy, while some others are junk, being able to tell this difference is the key between loosing your time and having a fruitful link building campaign. How you can tell if a directory is good enough or that you should pass it. Here are the 3 main criteria of identifying a good directory from a bad one.

1. Make sure the directory is listed in the search engines and most pages are being crawled. Be sure you can find the directory in the most popular search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. Also the category pages of the directory should be cached on the search engines. If the directory offers detail pages, these should be indexed too.

2. The links need to be plaintext, not redirects or javascript. 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 seen and counted by search engines.

3) Be sure the directory doesn’t link to bad neighborhoods. Ensure that the directory doesn’t link to questionable websites, specially topics like gambling, casino adult, and illegal content websites.

Good advice.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006 at 2:45 pm.
Filed under Traffic Tips, Internet Marketing, Your Site.
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