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Directories - What You Should Know

If you want to know how to get good links to your web site: there is no finer way than getting one-way links from human edited, high page rank directories.

But would you be surprised to know, linking to some PR6 directories will gain you very little benefit?

The conventional wisdom of linking to directories -- particularly the high page ranked directories edited by a human -- is very sound, for this reason. Although search engines -- particularly Google (thanks to their Latent Semantic Indexing) -- are getting better at deciding how good web site content is, they still rely heavily on "votes" to your site in the form of links from authority sites. There are few better authority sites than the human edited directories, because a human editor will vet a site before including it in their directory.

Therefore, if the Googlebot detects a link from such a directory to your site, it takes notice. It then looks to see what page rank has been attributed to the page from whence comes your link.

And that's where the problem starts, because all apparently equal directories prove not to be equal in practice.

You see, there are plenty of lists of directories around, and some even give you the page rank of each site. Being a shrewd webmaster, what are you going to do? Of course you are: you're going to submit your web site to the directories with the greatest page rank. Obvious, isn't it? 

Unfortunately, sometimes the obvious isn't the best course of action.

Here's some figures for you, based on a target Google page rank of six. You've got a good site with plenty of good content and you submit it to the directories.  Here's the number and type of link you need to obtain to get that coveted page rank of six.

You either need about 500 links to your site with a page rank four
or . . . 100 links to your site with a page rank five
or . . . just 18 links from pages ranking six.

Which would you choose?

Unfortunately, although there are quite a few directories with a page rank of six -- several as high as seven or more -- this often only applies to the home page. As you drill down to the page where your link is likely to be placed, you will often find the page rank going lower and lower. Sometimes, the page where your link would be coming from will have a big fat zero. And this can even happen with many sites with home page rank of six or more.

You need over 90,000 links from pages with a page rank of at least one to make a dent in that PR6 rating for your web site links. So, if you aren't going to waste a truckload of time, you must be very careful to evaluate directories using a page rank indicator tool. Don't bother inviting any directory to vet your site until you have vetted them -- and the page your link will be on.

© Copyright 2006 Paul Hooper-Kelly and InternetMarketingMagician.com

KEYWORDS: how to get links to your web site, linking to directories, search engines, Google, Latent Semantic Indexing, web site content, directories with the greatest page rank, evaluate directories

WORDS: 504

SUMMARY: If you want to know how to get good links to your web site: there is no finer way than getting one-way links from human edited, high page rank directories. But would you be surprised to know, linking to some PR6 directories will gain you very little benefit?