I want to ask a question here, and I want directory owners to give a real, hard think about this: Is your directory really seo friendly?

I’m now passing the 10,000 submissions mark for directory submissions I’ve done. Let me tell you; I have seen a lot of these “seo friendly” directories: and many of them really aren’t what they state they are. If you advertise yourself as seo friendly, then by George you should maintain that with the way your directory works and functions. If there’s little or no benefit of being listed in your directory: why would anyone want to be?

Some common things that make a directory not seo friendly:

• Broken Pagination: If a user cannot correctly navigate throughout your website without running into 404 errors or 500 errors, then search engines can’t either.
• Poor Category Structure: If you have 700 websites listed under the “internet” category; yet the topics range from free banner advertising to dialup internet service - where is the relevancy? In my opinion, these “seo friendly directories” are simply glorified FFA pages.
• Nofollow Attribute: If you even want to consider your directory seo friendly, then this should be a curse word in your vocabulary. However, I am seeing more an more directories using this as a ploy to get people to pay exorbitant fees for their weakly ranked directories.
• Super restrictive submission guidelines: Understandably there must be rules and guidelines for submissions or every directory would look like they were running an ad farm. However, in my opinion, directories should give submitters some leeway during submission so that they can build their link popularity using relevant anchor text and descriptions. Every directory cannot be like dmoz, and shouldn’t be.

These are a few of the problems I’ve encountered with so called seo friendly directories; likely there are others that have other findings as well. Feel free to post your thoughts on this.

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