In addition to this, a SEO friendly directory should not employ the use of the rel=nofollow attribute to the submitted websites nor use meta tags or the robots.txt file to otherwise hinder the crawling of links by search engine robots for submitted websites to these directories.
As k yourself these questions for Quality directories before submitting:
- Do they accept submissions from junk websites?
- Do they keep related websites grouped together, or do they dump a bunch of non-related links together?
If I visit a directory and I see a link for a made for adsense pharmacy website in the same category as a webmaster forum: I immediately know that this is not the type of directory where I want my website endorsed. This is a personal decision, and may not reflect the people that think along the lines of “it’s about quantity of backlinks, not quality”.
Some common things that make a directory not SEO friendly:
- Broken Pagination: If a user cannot correctly navigate throughout a website without running into 404 errors or 500 errors, then search engines can’t either.
- Poor Category Structure: If a directory has 700 websites listed under the “internet” category; yet the topics range from free banner advertising to dialup internet service - where is the relevancy?
- Super restrictive submission guidelines: Understandably there must be rules and guidelines for submissions or every directory would look like they were running an ad farm. However directories should give submitters some leeway during submission so that they can build their link popularity using relevant anchor text and descriptions. Every directory cannot be like dmoz, and shouldn’t be.
Analyze each directory before choosing it for directory submission. It sure isn’t a blind task.
