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Friday 7 October 2011

Directory Link Building

Directory Link Building
 Directory Link Building

When linkbuilding a good place to start is by submitting to directories. There are a number of factors to consider to determine whether a directory is worth submitting your website to. These factors are:

internet marketing

First, check to make sure that search engine spiders can follow the links in those directories. While getting traffic from your directory listing is nice, it doesn't usually tend to be a significant amount. Most of the time, the benefit to being listed comes from the fact that you're building a network of trusted incoming links. To determine if the search engine spiders can follow a directory link, check to see if that directory is using direct links to the sites listed within. Some directories use redirected, nofollow, or JavaScript links, and none of these link types will help the spiders find your site.

To further clarify, let's say that your site is called www.your-site.com and you're being linked to from a site called www.their-site.com. A direct link in the HTML source code would look like:

<a href="http://www.your-site.com/">Click here!</a>

A JavaScript link would look like:

<a href="JavaScript:void(0)" onclick="window.open('http://www.your-site.com/')" onmouseover="status='http://www.your-site.com/'; return true;" onmouseout="status=defaultStatus; return true;"">Click here!</a>

A redirected link would look like:

<a href="http://www.their-site.com/redir.php?r=http://www.your-site.com/">Click here!</a>

And a nofollow link looks like:

<a href="http://www.your-site.com/" rel="nofollow">Click here!</a>

They'll be variations on these types of links, but most will look very similar to the examples given above.

After checking to make sure that the links were direct, we also checked the meta tags at the top of the directory page's source code to make sure that they did not contain the noindex,nofollow attribute.

The noindex,nofollow attribute is part of the robots Meta tag, placed in the HEAD section of an HTML page, and looks something like the following:

<html>
<head>
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
<meta name="description" content="This page is about....">
<title>...</title>
</head>
<body>

The next step is to check to see if search engines are crawling and indexing the directory. This can be done using the site: command offered by most search engines. For example, to see all the pages from Fresh Thinking Business
http://konac.kontera.com/javascript/lib/imgs/grey_loader.gif
that have been indexed by Google, type the following into the Google search bar: site:http://www.freshthinkingbusiness.com

If you find that very few of the directory's pages have been indexed, then you'll know it's mostly being ignored by the search engines, and is thus not a good directory to submit your site to.

Also, by clicking the Cached link found near each of the site: search results, you can see how recently that search engine indexed the page. The more recent, the better-as that means the search engine is actively crawling and indexing that directory.

Most importantly, make sure the page you're planning to list your site on is in Google's index. Do a search for some text on the page surrounded in quotes. If the page isn't listed, or if the cache date is more than 3 months old, then there's little value in your being listed there.

Also look at the overall quality of the directory, especially in regards to advertising. If the directory is full of to pharmacy or gambling sites, it's probably a bad idea to have your site listed there.

Finally, look at the PageRank of the directory's homepage and, to a lesser degree, the PageRank of the actual directory page you expect your site will be listed on. Although PageRank isn't the most important factor when choosing to submit to a directory, it helps us gain an idea of how highly Google regards that particular directory. Obviously, the higher the PageRank, the better.

In cases where the PageRank is very low (PR=0-3) that could indicate the directory is not an important one at all-or even that its been penalized by Google. These are the directories we avoid submitting to.

Don't forget you can start you're directory link building right here at the Fresh Thinking Business global business directory

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