How to Evaluate a Directory Before You Submit a Site
 by John Heard

How to Evaluate a Directory Before You Submit a Site so you can avoid the ones that waste your time!
— by John Heard

evaluating directoryOne of the most frequent questions we receive is...

How did you choose which directories submit to?

That's a really good question actually. There are a lot of directories out there, some are free, some charge, some charge a lot, and not all of them will be worth your time or money. Some of them might even contribute to a Google Penalty!

We consider a number of factors in determining which directories to include for the primary purpose of building PageRank, Authority, Trust and Traffic.

We use these factors to decide what general directories to include in our Directory Master Chart, and you can use the exact same criteria to evaluate whether a directory or any other similar service is worth submitting your site to, specifically when looking to raise your link profile in the major search engines and hopefully some referral traffic as well.

Here's our process:

Check The Links

First, we check to make sure that search engine spiders could 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 li...

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