Which directories to submit to?
Lately I’ve been submitting to a lot of paid directories in addition to the normal free ones I use. The question with paid directories is, quite simply, whether or not they are cost effective. Well, as you would probably have guessed, some are, and some aren’t. It really depends on the price, and the quality of the back link you will be getting from the directory.
I found a post about the Strongest Directories in which the author looks at a couple of systems for ranking directory strength. The first system looked at the IBLs pointing to the directories and then checked how many of them were from apparent authority sites—this was based on whether or not the link came from the Yahoo Directory, DMOZ, or an .edu/.gov site. This metric lost much of its support after Matt Cutts publicly stated that .gov and .edu sites don’t inherently carry more linking power than other sites.
The author then looks at a new system designed by the good people at Seomoz. They have created a more comprehensive back link analysis tool that they use to assign sites a rating (termed Page Strength Score). This system actually seems to be a fairly decent representation of how Google might actually judge pages. How does this all tie in to the directory worthiness question? Well, the author of the post I referred to previously has used the Seomoz tool to check the Page Strength of all the directories from Bob Mutch’s popular comprehensive directory listing, and he then ranks them on his site in order of Page Strength. This way, someone like me who is trying to decide which directories to submit to can just run down the list, looking at the combinations of Page Strength and price, and make a decision on whether or not the directory measures up. It’s a cool tool that I’ve bookmarked and will use in the future.