Are General Directory Submissions Still Beneficial for Seo Today?

With the mainstream knowledge of the importance of incoming links for search engine optimization (SEO); many website owners are turning to general directory submissions in order to build link popularity for their websites. However, do these general directory submissions still have benefits for seo, or is the effectiveness of general directory submissions all but dead?

The answer really lies in what kind of link you're receiving. When nearly every one of the thousands of online directories claims to be a "seo friendly directory", what makes any one directory more "seo friendly" than another?

Traits of a seo friendly directory

A seo friendly directory is one that not only allows search engine robots to crawl your website link in a way that "weight" is transferred, but also where the directory is maintained in a way where closely related links remain in close proximity to each other and where there are a limited number of links per page.

So, an "un" seo friendly directory would be one where search engines are prohibited from crawling certain pages or links; the reasons could be due to poor pagination, the use of session id's, disallowing certain directory pages in the robots.txt file, use of "noindex,nofollow" in the robots meta tag or the use of the "nofollow" attribute on a website link. While it's easy to create a directory that is unfriendly for search engine optimization purposes, it's difficult and time consuming to create and maintain a seo friendly directory.

Currently, some major search engines are taking action and lowering the value of links received from many of these so called seo friendly directories. This is due, at least in part, to the directories linking to "bad" websites or because they simply do not take the time to maintain proper categorization of their directory links; in essence making many of these seo friendly directories no more effective for search engine optimization than submitting your website to a FFA network.

If you're performing directory submissions and you stumble across a so called seo friendly directory that has links for websites promoting debt consolidation next to websites offering cheap Viagra; you should probably save your energy and skip that directory altogether. If links received from that directory still hold any seo value; it won't be for long.

While search engines are taking action and lowering the value of links from some of these formerly seo friendly directories, general directory submissions can still be considered a beneficial seo method that will help build your link popularity. However, just because a directory labels itself as a "seo friendly directory" doesn't mean that it really is.

To avoid wasting time and effort on directory submissions that will hold little value for seo purposes, it is recommended that you use a seo friendly directory list that is regularly updated by website owners that have an interest in directory submissions. Two examples of this are the info.vilesilencer.com website and the addurl.nu website. These websites maintain seo friendly directory lists where they do all of the "seo friendly" qualifying for you, all you need to do is visit their website and use the lists that they so graciously maintain.

Not all directory submissions will be beneficial for search engine optimization purposes, but if you take a little bit of time to use only seo friendly directories, you'll discover that general directory submissions still hold search engine optimization benefits today.