Looksmart and Google PR

...What is Looksmart's Impact? Worth it?

[Jane_O]

Basically that's the question: Does Looksmart Listing have any kind of substantial Google PR Impact? Anything close to Yahoo or DMOZ?

Thanks! Jane-O

[webman]

I think a LookSmart listing is worth a lot if it is a non-paid link. If you can get your listing into Zeal your link will be listed with a clean URL. If you have to submit to LookSmart through the LookListings program, there will be LookSmart tracking in front of your URL and this may or may not detract from your ranking. Anyone else have a paid link that has helped or hurt their Google ranking?

For a point of reference, I have had LookSmart non-paid links (Zeal) that have given me a PR5 with no other links. I have also had links that have given me a PR3. It definitely depends on what category you are in and how many outgoing links on your site, as well as many other factors.

[rfgdxm1]

I've never seen a Zeal or Looksmart backlink on Google. While Looksmart's robots.txt does allow it, the directory is cgi driven and thus probably unspiderable, even if Google wished to do so.

[webman]

You're right that Zeal and LookSmart may not be in Google's backlinks, but I've seen their links listed quite often in Google under more specific searches. Also, MSN's directory gets very high pagerank. And anything included in LS or Zeal, is included in MSN. Also, a LS listing is include in AltaVista and a ton of other directories that probably help in pagerank.

I don't really understand why backlinks aren't included in Google but I assume they aren't included because it would be redundant to add directory categories from ODP, LS, MSN, AV, etc, when Google is really only teamed with ODP and Yahoo.

With that said, whether or not LookSmart / Zeal is as important in calculating pagerank as ODP or Yahoo, it definitely helps your pagerank if you have the link.

[Hawkgirl]

but I've seen their links listed quite often in Google under more specific searches

I just found a TON of my L$ listings indexed by Google. They had never really shown up in Google searches before. Is Google indexing L$, does L$ have a sneaky XML-feed-type deal with Google, or am I just oblivious and has this been the norm all along?

[rfgdxm1]

Take a look at this Google search:

[google.ca...]

Definitely Google has spidered at least parts of the Looksmart directory. A quick check however shows that Google may not have spidered all of Looksmart.

[Slade]

I looked up some of this a few days ago when I got my zeal listing. On zeal.com it is not a "clean" link. They link from the result pages to an exit.phtml(or something), and those are specifically banned in robots.txt

Now that I have my listing though, I'll do some looking to see if it starts showing up from anywhere else.

MSN's listing is a clean link. (If I knew the full zeal passthrough, I'd look for some more.)

[rfgdxm1]

Looksmart's robot.txt would allow spidering even if Zeal doesn't. Thus if Google wanted to spider all of the Looksmart directory, they could.

[Slade]

[directory.google.com...]

That link shows 6 sites using looksmart: AltaVista, CNN, MSN, iWon, UKPlus, and InfoSpace.

I wasn't able to determine if MSN pages are spidered, I'm going to check some others now...