Web Directories Still Provide a Concrete Foundation Within the Web
From a recent post Aaron Wall made on the viability of directories within the SEO field, I would like to take that to a more inept level of news discussion considering the media directories have obtained of late, due to their future viability.
What this post, in conjunction with the recent interview with Greg Hartnett, outlines is that directories still remain a firm foundation within the web itself, regardless how search engines interact with them.
Aaron makes point of a test he performed, where he submitted to directories only, and gained top rankings for a handful of non-competitive terms that would have cost the customer around the $600 a month mark for the same exposure within the Pay Per Click (PPC) medium.
Yahoo! and MSN still tend to count directory links (including low quality directory links) far more than Google does. For a new one page flash site I got about 50 directory links in a couple days a while ago. It competes for a basket of low traffic $3 per click terms that can cost about $600 a month ranking at about #2 on the PPC ads.
Whilst this says that directories still play an influential role within rankings, Greg Hartnett's comments to the following question outline the importance from a directory owners point of view:
Q: Google said it will devalue links that are bought for the sole intention of increasing PageRank. BOTW costs money, and many people buy it for the PR. Are you worried BOTW's links will be devalued?
A: I try not to concern myself with those matters very much. We are fully committed to building a quality directory a resource for users to find relevant information. We focus on doing our thing, and let the search engines do their thing. The chips fall where they may.
As a directory owner myself, I know from my own experience within the industry, that regardless what the SEO forums depict about the flavour of the month, everything continues to evolve respective of their comments.
Greg's opening question outlays where the legitimate directories upon the web lie, and the importance they play to the search engines through helping them identify what is a quality resource and what is not.
Q: What is a Web Directory, and how is it different from a Search Engine, or Internet Yellow Pages?
A: Typically a directory is categorized and sorted by humans actual people review each site, describe and title it, and categorize it accordingly. Each site is reviewed to ensure editorial guidelines are met, helping to keep spam at bay. The search results from a directory are limited to the pool of sites that are listed within the directory. The Internet Yellow Pages would be an example of a niche directory, as they tend to deal with commercial sites exclusively.
By contrast, search engines tend to be driven by spiders attempting to crawl all of the content online, and sorting the results according to proprietary algorithms. Search engines draw their results from a much wider set of data, and use filters to combat spam and irrelevant results.
SEO forums are the blame and generally the misguided source of content with everything rankings orientated. It is these very sources that two years ago told all to submit to directories, every directory you could get your hands on, thus creating a bubble similar to the dot com era, which also burst. These comments inflated the directory field to a point where webmasters where establishing directories for short term profit, then gone when the bubble burst. The remaining handful of directories must then fight through that tarnish they where brushed, to prove they are still a quality resource as they where before the bubble, similar to what certain technology sectors are still doing from that bubble.
Search engines themselves are their own worst enemy at times, as they role out such concepts as contextual advertising, with initial stringent processes to obtain the right to use the medium, to where now every webmaster has access to abuse the platform by creating DMOZ replicas, scraped niche specific directories plastered with contextual advertisements and so forth, all in the name of a quick buck.
The facts still remain though, until such time as search engine take up human editing of all top ranked listings, directories will remain to play an influential role of authority for the search engines through human editing and review processes.
