Are Directories Irrelevant to Search Engine Optimization?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 14 of March , 2008 at 8:15 am

SEO Book, just this morning, mused about the fall in PageRank of a respected directory, JoeAnt. The directory evidently fell in PageRank, to a 3. It’s not surprising, really. You have to pay to be listed in JoeAnt, which means your link is a paid link and we all know how Google feels about those for Search Engine Optimization.

DMOZ, on the other hand, still gets a nod of respect from Google. Even though Google no longer needs data from DMOZ in order to index websites, it still crawls the human edited directory and uses the information. If it were up to me, I’d degrade DMOZ and give paid directories like JoeAnt a boost. But, of course, it’s not up to me. Is it?

Yesterday, DMOZ announced that it has had visitors from over 200 countries. Surprised? I’m not. It’s an old website. They’ve been around a long time. And Google loves them. I’d be surprised if they didn’t have that many countries in their referrer bin.

I’ve said for a long time now that directories are losing relevance. It’s not entirely true. I do believe that general directories are a lot less important than they used to be for Search Engine Optimization. With the advent of other marketing tools like blogging, social bookmarking, social networking, and RSS, directory listings just seem so slow moving. That’s especially true of DMOZ. It usually takes up to a year to get a listing in DMOZ, and that’s after you submit your site. By that time you could have built up thousands of inbound links using other methods. It does make one wonder why we should waste our time with DMOZ? Answer: Because it’s still loved by Google. The evidence is its PR of 8.

Category: Directories

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