Directories serve two purposes in your web development efforts.
One, a link from a directory is counted as a back link and hence
increases your link popularity. Two, some directories
will send you targeted traffic.
Webmasters who use directories for increasing link popularity
should check out the directory first to see if the directory
is SE friendly or not as, only a SE friendly directory will
give value for their links.
So, how do you detect a SE friendly directory? Here are some
tips, which will help you do so.
1) Check the url format of the directory. Some directories
have urls in the format
http://sitename//index.php?id=1&c=10...
for their category pages. This is called a dynamic link and
search engines find it difficult to crawl such pages.
Urls for the category pages should be in a static format.
Example :
http://www.indexbizz.com/cat1.html . Search engines
can easily crawl such pages and your link will also get crawled.
2) Your link should not be a JavaScript link. Some directories
use JavaScript to jump to your site from their category pages.
Search engines find it difficult to crawl such links.
3) The directory must not ban search engine robots from crawling
the category pages. You can check whether such a condition exists
or not by looking at the robots.txt file of the directory. This
file is located at the root level of the directory. To see this
file just type robots.txt after the domain name of the directory.
Find out what this file is saying, for example -
User-agent: *
Disallow:
This will allow all SE bots to all the folders and files in the
directory.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
This will keep all SE bots away from all files/ folders in the
directory.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /mydirectory/
This will keep away all SE bots from crawling the 'mydirectory'
directory and all files under it.
So be wise in your selection of SE friendly directories, and put
your efforts towards getting links from such directories that
fulfill the above conditions.
About the author:
Osan Mundae writes for
http://www.indexbizz.com/
