Is it worth building directories anymore?
I’m sure you are all aware of the most recent Google update that took ages , maybe because of all the Google caffeine integrations. I was quite happy that my blogs got updated and i finally got a page rank on one of my blogs but i have been questioning the use of directories lately. As every SEO i have done quite a lot of link building in my time and i still do as i believe link building is a great way to rank for terms and keywords in Google and to drive loads of traffic to a your website. Link building to me means building a variety of links that will contribute to the required result in Google. These links good be directories, blogs, article submissions, blog commenting and some other types. I’m quite skeptical about the use of directories these days, it seems Google is punishing all the spam directories and in general devaluing all the directories. I had a list that i made about 6 months ago that listed ( The directory name, the url and the page rank) I went and checked the page rank of the directories after the recent update and most of the directories where significantly devalued, some of them went from page rank 5 to page rank 1 or zero, which is a disaster, for them anyway.
I also noticed that most of the directories that got devalued were the spammy directories, most of the good directories remained the same (page rank wise) or got devalued a bit. I personally believe that some directories are worth submitting to, but the majority of them are significantly devalued and if you are linking to them it might have negative effects for your website too. I’m still going to build directory links however i will differentiate the good links from the bad quality ones. I still think the best way to got about link building is to use a variety of links, we just have to watch from now on ,and not submit thousands of links to random directories as it will most probably have a negative effect!
Ari