Online directories

While web directories are declining in importance, they still provide potential traffic sources and inbound links.

Web directories originated during the dawn of the Internet as a way to categorize sites and provide an index of all the content on the web. Directories are somewhat primitive compared to modern search engines, usually relying on human editors to approve submissions, restricting sites to a small number of categories, and treating entire domains as one entry rather than looking at each page.

There’s much debate about whether directories have a role as the Internet develops, and how much weighting search engines such as Google give to these indexes. However, purely from an SEO perspective, it doesn’t hurt your site’s rankings and there are other benefits for websites to be included in these lists wherever possible:

  • Your site may receive additional traffic from users of these directories – not everyone is using Google, Yahoo! and Bing to find results.
  • Some directories have very high PageRank scores so your site’s PR will benefit from the inbound links.

Adding your site to online directories is not the same thing as submitting to search engines, which is usually not necessary. For example, although there is a page called Submit URL to Google, you don’t need to do this. Providing there are inbound links to your pages from sites already in their index, Google will follow the trail and find your site without needing to be given the URL. It’s somewhat counter-intuitive that Google should host its own submission page that has no effect, but adding your site to this page does not add you to the Google index, nor does it change the frequency in which the spiders return if you add the same site over and over.

In the book, we cover DMOZ and a range of other high-PR online directories.