Submission of website to directories was believed to be very important factor in early days of search engine optimization. Many people were spending more hours to submit website to directories than optimizing it. And they were getting quick ranking too. But now, according to experts, scene has changed. Every niche market is getting dense like never before. Competition to rank well in organic search result has became difficult ever since the entry of Google and its PageRank. Importance of links on directory page lead to launch of thousands of directories in short span of time. Thats why, today, many people doubt if submission to directories is productive anymore.

If Google’s webmaster guidelines is to be believed website submission to directories is still important.

In fact, it is one of the way to convince search engine bots to crawl and rank the listed website for particular keywords. Condition is directory must not be spam directory.

I would recommend you to refer this post where author have discussed somewhat important points about measuring criteria of directories. Certainly it is useless to submit website to the directories which have Low PR, law traffic and very few pages indexed (e.g index page only).

Since we know the characteristics of directories of good quality why not looking out for such directories? Because if litmus test is there then there has to be someone capable to pass it out. Criteria that were needed to check against were known like directories with good PR, good traffic, good PR of internal pages and maturity (i.e how long a directory is up online). Life of a directory is, I guess, very important. A webmaster may managed to get good traffic and high PR of index page but it is extremely difficult to maintain it for long time unless it is of good quality.

Things To Figure Out High Quality Directories

Traffic: Traffic is something that we may not want if the page url is going to be considered as backlink. There are some directories whose traffic is more than 100 visitors per day. Even if we assume 60% of that traffic is of submitters, 40% traffic of genuine visitors is quite good thing.

PR of index page: PR is the one and only scale to determine the quality of a page. Pages with high PR assumed to be having more back links.

PR of Internal Pages: It takes 2-3 updates to gain PR for main domain but it takes much more time for internal pages. Directories with internal pages of 1,2 or 3 PR should be considered to be good.

Life of Domain: As I said earlier that it is very difficult to maintain good PR and traffic for long time and PR for internal pages is even more difficult. I know of many directories that were, two months back, used to be PR6 and higher now they are PR2 or PR3. So, a directory has to be nice if it is active for 3 or more years with good PR throughout.

There is a cool way to check these all out, the way that I have used to build list of 20 directories (Which I have shared with you at the end). Simple solution is use SEO quake addon for Firefox. Follow below procedure…..

• Install SEO quake addon: This addon will display all the details of a page in Google search result which are important from SEO point of view . You don’t have to visit website.(restart Firefox after installation).
• Search: Log on to google, search with site:www.directory-name.com. This query will produce result of many indexed internal pages of a particular website.
• Observe: 1) Check out the PR of main domain 2) At least 60% i.e. 6 out 10 and 12 out of 20 internal pages should have some PR. 3) check out traffic on alexa. Directory should be good if it shows some traffic curve in graph.

Here is the list of 20 directories which I have obtain following above procedure. I also have a legally hacked tool to submit website which I will share some other time.

www.skaffe.com
www.geniusfind.com
www.vlib.org
www.ipl.org*
www.directory.v7n.com*
www.webworldindex.com*
www.gimpsy.com
www.superpages.ca
www.chiff.com*
www.depensez.com
www.searchsight.com/submit.htm*
www.gmdir.com*
www.mavicanet.com
www.lii.org/*
www.botw.org
www.goguides.org
www.tygo.com
www.elib.org
www.rubberstamped.org
www.qoobe.org