Thread: Website Directories - The truth behind the PR Extras...

Everyone is thinking about the whole website directory issue; and whether you can earn a better page rank from submitting your website to link directories.

THE TRUTH... IS YES/NO!...

Submitting your website to the occasional website links directory can be helpful, (Best to use relevant directories to your websites content).

Although i say this... Many webmaster's tend to submit their website to many website directories within a short (3 month) period of time.

To many sudden back links from "Directories" or even good quality websites can be thrown into the Google Sandbox. In this "Sandbox" Google will slowly look through and check the relevancy of these links to your site and see if they have been artificially created or if the website actually likes your site.

If you are found otherwise to have lots of directory links coming back to your site. You may get penalized due to breaking the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

WHY? - The Google Webmaster Guidelines state:

• Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

• Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Be careful in linking and getting other links to your websites...

~ Mike

Thanks for the valuable info. Yes..it may be one of the criteria for google to penalize the sites.

I don't endorse that opinion at all. Even if you submit to 1000 directories in a day (which seems rather difficult to do :P ) directories take a lot of time in approving submissions and google (and other SEs) would also take time in indexing directory pages. Please note that most of the times it is 're-indexing'.

If you ONLY have directory pages to your website, I do sense some trouble, but otherwise, I think it should be fine. Directories are still good for SEO.

The point about "bad neighborhood" is understood but even a signature link in a dofollow webmaster forum can be seen as a "trick intended to improve search engine rankings".