What is a SEO-Friendly Directory? What make a directory seo friendly.

Why use a Submission Service?

Filtering the long lists, submitting to each one of them, varying the anchor text, ... Highlighting the importance of a directory submission service.

How Directory Links can help improve my site's rankings

Detailing the importance of web directories in SEO and how they help in improving a site's search engine rankings.

Differences between a Link Farm and a Directory

How to differentiate between a link farm and a web directory. Highlighting the major differences between the two.

Why should I even submit my site to Web Directories?

Having your site listed in various directories can benefit your site in more ways than one.

Directory Submission Guidelines

Avoid some of the more commonly made mistakes made when submitting sites to directories.

Effect of Directory Links on Search Engine Rankings

Analyzing the impact that directory links have on search engine rankings. Do directory links help in improving a site's search engine rankings?

Which directories should I submit to?

How to tell which directory is worth submitting to. See the list of directories you should be submitting to.

What is an SEO-Friendly Directory?

A link to your site would count only if it’s possible for the search engines to “read” or “detect” the link. When submitting your site to a web directory, you’d want to make sure whether the link you get from the directory would be counted by the search engines. There are quite a few directories that give out links which are not counted by the search engines, i.e. they are not seo-friendly links.

So what would make a directory seo-friendly?

There are a few things a directory needs to do to ensure its seo-friendly:

There shouldn’t be a META nofollow or noindex tag on the link pages

If you find a links page with the following code in it: <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”> then the links on that page wouldn’t be counted by the search engines.

The ‘noindex’ portion of the code basically tells the search engines to ignore that page and the ‘nofollow’ tells it not to follow or count any of the links on the page.

So even if one of those parameters exists in the meta tag of the link or category page, it would be considered non-seo-friendly.

The links shouldn’t have a ‘rel=nofollow’ tag on them

If the links on a page are displayed in the following format:
<a href=http://www.domain.com rel=’nofollow’>Domain</a>,
then the link wouldn’t be counted as the ‘nofollow’ tag again tells the search engines to ignore the link.

The links shouldn’t be javascript-generated

If you view the coded section of the links page and see that the links are being displayed in a coded format other than the standard <a href=”></a> format, then there’s a good chance that the link is being displayed through a script, which would again not be counted by the search engines.

The links shouldn’t be re-directed

Some directories link out through indirect links, e.g. <a href=”http://www.webdirectory.com/link.php?link_id=53”>Website</a>. These types of links are not valuable as they’re not direct links to the website.

The url of the links page contains too many parameters

http://www.webdirectory.com/link.php?u=23&as=2323434324&as=23423asfsfas&pw=32433

While this may not necessarily make a directory non-seo-friendly but it’s speculated that search engines don’t index pages with too many parameters in the url or place less value on links residing on such pages.

So if a directory is to be considered seo-friendly, it would need to pass all the criteria mentioned above. Directory Maximizer ensures that all the directories on its submission list passes each of these criteria.