Earlier there were essential part was directory submission to launch a new site and directories like DMOZ, Yahoo, etc.. considered industry-specific directories for links. With these directories you can boost your rankings on search engine. But as time goes it is now the most misunderstood concept of SEO about what link directories are. If your website is about furniture or clothing then it should be included in link directories either for furniture, clothing or at least a general web directory but your website within these categories.
While google crawl any directory it looks for websites listed near your listings to check your neighborhoods if those links are trusted then your site will be part of good neighborhood and if there are too many sites (with criteria like low rank, poor content, misused, advertisement, domain for sale, etc...) then your site will be part of very bad neighborhood.
Not all web directories are bad but yes there are too many directories which are useless now a days with some common features of them are:
- Multiple directories from same IP.
- Popup ads.
- Spamming
- Site is not indexed and searchable from google.
There are also some web directories exists where once your website will be listed after editors evaluation and that is reviewed by an actual human being to make sure that all the sites listed are with good content or at least useful. If your site listed on these kind of directories then you will get some benefit from it as your website will be surrounded by other good sites.
According to Matt Cutts (On behalf of google) When considering submitting to a directory, check for:
- Does the directory reject urls or approve whatever URLs suggested?
- What is the quality of URLs in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the URLs that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url.
With this information I would like to suggest free(Absolutely) and solid web directory with approval after editors evaluation. Tractify
