Directories are the best means for getting related links and targeted traffic. There are a huge number of directory sites present all over the world. Some of them are less useful to users. We need to judge the quality of directory sites before submitting our site to that directory. Some of the directories even charge a good amount, so we need to be very careful before investing our money in the directories. The different types of criteria on which we can judge a directory are as follows:-
1> PAGE RANK:- Page Rank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. This is the criteria allotted by Google. It depends on two factors namely "On Page" and "Off Page". Basically we can judge a directory on the basis of its PR. The PR should be a decent one. It does not mean that we are avoiding the zero PR directory sites. Today's zero PR may be tommorow's 5 PR.
Basically a directory site should at least be cached by Google and have some decent PR.
2> Spider Friendly Links:- Spider friendly links are the links which can be spidered by the search engine robots e.g. Google bot is the robot of Google. It means the directory site should provide static link i.e. it means the url of the directory from where we get the link should not contain any "?" or "&" mark. These are clearly an example of dynamic link as they generally pass some query to the database and gather the information from there and shows these in the result page. So we should avoid these types of directories which include such type of url.
The other criteria for spider friendly link is that the link should not redirect to our site, it should be a direct one. It means if we place the mouse over the link to our site, the url of our site should be clearly visible in the status bar. For this we can also check the source of that particular page, whether they are giving us a direct link or they are redirecting to our site.
3> Easy Submission Procedure:- The submission procedure of that directory site should be as easy as possible. Some directories have a lengthy submission procedure which sometimes irritates us. Some of the directories require user login before we can submit any link. So the submission procedure might not be complex enough.
4> Well Organized Categories:- The categories of that directory site should be well organized meaning it does not contain too many or too less number of categories. There should be a balance between the number of categories. The categories should also be proper, meaning the sub category food does not come under category directories.
5> Should Contain Good Links:- Generally the links in any category should be good enough i.e. does not contain links to bad neighborhood sites. Bad neighborhood sites means the illegal sites, adult sites, pharmacy sites, gambling sites etc. If the site is containing some adult site or gambling site then it should contain in the proper category only.
6> How Old That Directory IS:- We have to check the creation date of that directory also, as that directory might be a new one. We can check the age of the directory from www.whois.sc. As we all know OLD IS GOLD so we should try to give emphasize on the older sites. Well, it does not mean that we should avoid the newer ones, as later they will also become old.
7> Alexa Rank:- Though not a big deal but alexa rank is the criteria of a directory which tells us how much visitors they are getting. We can check the alexa rank at www.searchbliss.com/alexa-rank-tool.htm
So, depending on all these factors we can easily judge whether it is worthy to submit in a directory or not.
About the author: Alok Vats is very new to the field of web, he has a blog at aloonpre. He has written this article after going through at least one thousand directories on the net. He wants to build one directory for his own, but not the general one. He wants to make his directory which has something very new concept. He is looking forward for the suggestion from the old guys of this field.