Howdy Gang,

This week, Rand talks about directories and why so many of them have little to no value. Don't be mistaken though, there are still plenty out there that can be of serious help to a link building campaign.

For those of you who have Premium Membership, and want to try your hand at building some high-quality directory links, check out the section on directory link building in The Professional's Guide to Link Building and then hit up all of the hand-reviewed directories we recommend in The Premium Link Directory.

UPDATE from Rand:  I wanted to provide a quick run-down process on how to determine if the directory you're submitting to is valuable.

1. Does the directory itself (the home page) rank for any of the moderately competitive terms in it's title, e.g. for Aviva Directory, whose title tag is "Information - Aviva Web Directory," I searched Google for information web directory and didn't find them in the first 500 results.
2. Do the pages inside the directory rank well for their targeted phrases, e.g. I might check the financial forums page at Aviva by searching for financial forums information directory at Google - again, not in the top 500 results (even though the page is recently indexed). If I dont' find general pages, I'll search for more specific ones, like their page on ScaleModel.net with a search for international list of scale model related web sites (unbelievably not in the top 300)
3. Check the links to the directory - do they appear legitimate and valuable, e.g. For Aviva - 907,819 to the domain, 683,573 to the homepage. They're at close to a million links, but can't rank for even 5-6 word phrases in their title tags... Something's funny.
4. Check out mentions of the domain on the web - do they come from legitimate sources? Is it mostly SEO-related websites that are talking about them? If so, the engines might have less trust in them than in other types of sites, e.g. for Aviva, searching google for avivadirectory.com -site:avivadirectory.com.
5. Check the page strength - do they have links from edu and gov domains? Are they listed in places like dmoz or Wikipedia? Do blogs regularly link to them (Technorati numbers)? What's their PageRank? etc. For Aviva, they're a PS 7 (although the Technorati numbers aren't coming through right now).

This process is valuable because you can see that despite a lot of good looking factors on the exterior - PR, inlinks, etc. the rankings of the pages would indicate that something's funny... Good thing we checked.