Related Link Directory on my site - Good or Bad?

[zuko105]

Hey everyone,
I have a good question for ya.

Let's say that I have a company that sells bakery software. Let's also say, that I have a site that promotes this company, their news releases, and has plenty of content for spiders to crawl through.

Now, let's say that on this site I also have a directory of bakery companies. I have the bakery companies organized alphabetically. Now these companies' websites would be relevant to my topic, but would not necessarily be one of our customers....just an information source for someone that might want to find these companies' websites.

My question is this, is this a good or bad thing? I thought that it would be a nice touch to see that this site has this information available for visitors, and that the googlebot might see this as added value to the site.

Please let me know if you know anything about this sort of thing.

Thanks in advance everyone.

Zuko

[vincevincevince]

if you are competing for the same SERPS keywords as those other sites, you'll be stabbing yourself in the back by giving them higher PR.

you should not get penalised for such a directory, although that page only may be, depending on its size/number of links.

i recommend that you design your site with what the human visitors would find useful, and google will like as not find the same.

[martinibuster]

I find that creating a link directory is a great thing to do. It establishes your web site as an authority on bakery companies. This is the hub effect.

Google likes to see outbound links, not only inbounds. Link misers are only seeing half the picture.

[zuko105]

That's the thing though,
These sites that I am linking to, I am not competing with,
I am selling the software and this is the industry directory...added value to the site.

These pages might have 200+ links on them, but someone trying to find one of these companies would find it usefull.

Just wondering if this would either penalize my site altogether, or increase the PR of the site as a good resource for this information.

Zuko

[zuko105]

martinibuster

"the hub effect"

That's what my thinking on this was. I thought it was a good idea for added value and higher page rank.

Now just waiting for the next crawl......

Zuko