Are Directories Dead?

You may or may not have heard that Google has removed the recommendation in its webmasters guidelines section to submit to directories. This started a panic as people thought that having links in directories no longer held any weight. They thought this would have a knock on effect on their SEO results. In this article I discuss why people think this is an issue and reveal why Google really removed the recommendation.

Lets begin by talking about what directories do and how they affect your rankings. What directories do is allow you to submit your website so visitors to the directory can find resources. Your listing has a link to your website and this is why it can affect your rankings. This will increase your links and therefore increase your websites strength, in theory anyway. So if Google was to devaluate these links then surely lots of people’s websites will drop in rankings.

So why did Google remove this recommendation from the webmasters guidelines? One of the reasons it was thought that they had removed this advice was that Google themselves were going to create a directory of their own that wasn’t based on DMOZ but this has turned out not to be true. So getting back to the original question, why did Google remove it? Matt Cutts the long standing Google spokesperson who I am a regular reader of his blog answered this very question. Matt says there is always the chance that Google may devaluate these links but the reason they removed it was because they where seeing quite a lot of novice people seeing this recommendation and submitting their website to many poor quality directories.

This article contributed by Jack Mack.