In order to make the best use of your listing, the directory needs to provide a clean html link to your site that is available to search engines to crawl through. There are several ways to prevent search engines from crawling links in a directory. Some directories use javascript links or CGI redirects that search engines can't follow. Others may use special meta tags (either on the page or in an external text page) that tell the search engine crawlers not to follow the links, or they can utilize a special attribute in the HTML tag used for the link that tells search engines not to follow the link (the nofollow attribute).
When you submit your site to a directory using any of the methods above, you still get direct clicks from the listing. But you lose the added benefit that directories offer you in boosting your search engine rankings.
Number of Links on Page
The rule is simple - the fewer outgoing links available on a page, the better. Most directories limit the number of links on a page to 20-40, but some have long pages with hundreds of links on them. Getting listed on a page that has that kind of amount of outgoing links is pretty much useless. It's a waste of time and effort submitting to those directories.
The Directory's Link Popularity
You may have heard of the term Google PageRankTM. Essentially it's Google's way of measuring how important a page is by counting all of the links to that page, while taking into account how "important" those pages themselves are. If you have the Google toolbar installed, you can see a rough representation of a page's Google PageRank displayed (a small white and green bar and a score between zero and ten). Every website begins with a PageRank of zero. As it accumulates backlinks, PageRank changes to reflect that – the more backlinks and the higher the PageRank of those backlinks, the higher your site's PageRank.
The most popular sites on the Internet have a PageRank of ten (
Google.com for example), but for us mere mortals, achieving a PageRank of five can sometimes be an uphill struggle.
That is why when seeking backlinks to a website, most webmasters are looking for sites with a high PageRank score. The same is true for the directories listing to your site – the higher their PageRank the better. However, keep in mind that the PageRank you see on the Google toolbar is not up to date. The toolbar is updated approximately once every three months and what you're seeing on the toolbar is a reflection of PageRank as it was at the time of the last toolbar update.
For the sake of search results rankings, Google uses an internal version of PageRank that is constantly being updated. That means that a directory showing PageRank of zero on the toolbar, may very well have an actual PageRank of four or five, that will only show up on the toolbar in the next update. Moreover, PageRank tends to grow over time.
As the directory gains its own link popularity, you link is affected as well.
That is why we believe quality links can come from directories showing a PageRank of zero on the toolbar. With time that PageRank is likely to grow. Experience shows us that as PageRank grows and the directory becomes more active, owners begin to ask for a submission fee…
Which brings us to our last point.
Cost of Submission
The cost of submission varies greatly between directories. There are quite a few free directories around, but many ask for a submission fee, ranging from only a few dollars to hundreds of dollars per submission. Paid submissions are usually reviewed quicker, but most directories do not guarantee inclusion based on submission fees.
You still need to take care to submit only to appropriate sites doing so properly.
We have found that submitting to free directories can be very cost-effective, as most directories begin as free directories and begin to charge for listings as they develop.
