Directories and SEO

[Jason]

Should they be used? Well, they were incredibly popular in the early days of SEO. However, the whole situation became abusive as people turned it into a paid link scheme. Now, of course, Google and other engines say they are against paid links. However, the reality is that some links you buy, say high quality directory ones, are also paid links, but the acceptable kind. Anyway, though, these days the high quality directories liked by search engines are not SEO markets, but serve a legit service of proving high quality, but honestly, I'm wondering why a paid link directory scheme couldn't provide high quality information. Any ideas?

O.K., so have any of you submitted to a directory? Do you feel it improved SEO? Well, Google says officially it's a good move, as long as it's high quality, as we noted, but if people submit to a low-quality directory, does it hurt the SEO or does it do nothing? If it does hurt it, which I suspect it does, I wonder how by how much? Any thoughts?

Finally, who has considered the directory biz, the thing where you own the directory? That would be cool and great passive income, but the problem is that I'm assuming it would take years to build a great directory, unless, of course, you buy one already in existence. Anyhow, I don't think buying some high DA domain and turning it into a directory would be the magic fix. Do you all think that shortcut would work?

 

[Arantor]

There was a time Google liked directories because they were human curated and therefore pre-filtered for spam. But the days of Dmoz being a thing anyone cared about are a long, long time ago.

These days I don’t think Google really cares, unless you’re paying them for advertising or you’re selling ad space, you almost might as well not exist to them. Especially in light of them altering queries to rank paid keywords higher.

 

[Uncrowned]

Backlinks of any kind are still a positive, but Google is much more focused on the content that it's crawler finds and using algorithms to find new and helpful content. Granted, those algorithms are iffy at best, but pushing content that Google likes seems to work better than anything else I have tried.

Overall, when I write a page that is new and unique, Google will push it to the top 5 to top 10 on their rankings without much else involved, when I have pages that are repetitive to existing content, I barely see anything results and no amount of linking has ever fixed that as Google will directly show you the content yours is behind in their Search Console.

 

[Jason]

I would love to get into a directory biz. However, I'm not sure of the time to create a high quality directory. Anyway, my drumming site has a lot of directories in it. I recognize the fact that linking to other stuff makes my site way more interesting, even though I am not doing it for SEO purposes.