I think any reasonably competent SEO has the good sense on how to tell if a directory is ‘good’ or ‘eh.’
Unfortunately, many of our clients, let alone non-clients who think they can’t afford SEO advice, don’t have the well-honed sense of smell. Nor should they be expected to — one of the advantages for a business owner in working with a full-time search engine marketer is that the SEO spends their professional life being a search geek. Most ‘normal’ business owners need to spend their time knowing the ins and outs of their business.
Here are a few warning signs about if that ‘directory’ is crap:
- Are they indexed? I had someone ask me about submitting to a ‘directory’ that I was quickly able to determine wasn’t even indexed in Yahoo or Google. This is not the sign of hot traffic referral waiting to happen! The site: command is a good one for people wanting to get involved with their web site to learn.
- Age of domain. Now, I know that a lot of normal people don’t know how to use whois, but it’s really quite simple. If the domain is fairly new and the directory isn’t associated with someone you’ve heard of, caveat emptor.
- Request for reciprocal link. I recommend all suspicion of any reciprocal link request, but if this directory is prominent enough to drive traffic to you, why do they need you to link to them? In general, they’re going to have hundreds of outbound links, you probably have fewer. This means your link to them is likely more valuable than their link to you. So why bother?
- Have you heard of them? If you haven’t heard of them, will your clients have heard of them? It won’t be a good source of traffic if no one uses them.