Why Are Directories So Significant?
Why Are Directories So Significant?
If the Yahoo! Directory is hidden away, and if most people have never heard of the world’s second most important directory (the Open Directory Project at dmoz.org), why do you care about them? They’re still very significant for a number of reasons:
Yahoo! Directory is part of Yahoo! Search system, one of the world’s most popular search sites. As such, it still gets a lot of traffic. You can access it directly at dir.yahoo.com; some people do access it from the Yahoo! Main page.
The Open Directory Project feeds results to Google Directory, which is part of the worlds most popular search site, and it’s a free submission.
The Open Directory Project feeds results to literally hundreds of other sites, large and small. Many of these sites are crawled by the major search engines (such as Google), so a link from the Open Directory Project can show as links from many other sites, too.
Yahoo! Often uses directory entries for the blurb bellow page title is Web search results – the search results page shown when someone searches their indexes. Google used to grab the site description from the Open Directory Project (though doesn’t seem to be doing so at the time of writing), and Yahoo! Pulls the description from Yahoo! Directory, so having a directory entry sometimes allows you to control the text that appears on the search results pages for your site.
Links in major directories help provide context to search engines. If your site is in the Recreation: Pets: Dogs category in the open directory project, for instance, the search engines know that the site is related to Dogs. The directory presence helps search engines index your site and may help your site rank higher for some search terms.
Links as you should know are very important in convincing search engines that your site is of value. It’s sometimes possible to get links from hundreds of search directories, on pages indexed by the major search engines.
By the way, don’t underestimate the Open Directory Project just because you’ve never heard of it or because the submission forms are often broken or unreliable. Data from this system is widely spread across the Internet and has often been used to kick start major search systems. Yahoo!, for instance, once used data from the Open Directory Project (which, incidentally, is owned by AOL/Netscape). Want to get tons of free directory submissions Simi-Automatically? Then read this post and enjoy over 2,000 free high quality directory submissions in minimal time!
Link to this page
