Linking to Directory Listings

what's the methodology behind it?

[seth_wilde]

I received this email and rather than answering directly, I decided to post it here for the benefit of everyone. If anyone else has input feel free to jump in.

"Hi Seth

Can you please explain to me the methodology of using the links that you already have indexed by directories. For example in Google when I do a link: search it has no record of my ODP listing or my Google directory listing, how can I make google and other SE's aware of these valuable external links
?

If I submit the directory URL it will also spider all of the competition sites as well, is there a way around this ?

Thanking you in advance

Ian"

Through personal experience many SEO's have realized the benefit of links from major directories, the reason (besides the direct traffic)? Most search engines give some kind of link popularity boost for these types of links. Below I'll cover 2 of the more documented methods that the SE's use.

Page Rank

Page Rank was first introduced by Google. Page Rank takes the traditional link popularity idea and adds a twist. With page rank your link popularity is scored by adding up the link popularity scores of all the sites linking to you. With this method you want to link to the biggest most highly -connected sites available. Since you probably already have links from the major directories this is one of the easier ways to improve your link popularity.

Hubs and Authorities

With the "hubs and authorities" methodology search engines mine the link structure of the web and use that info to give a boost to pages that can either be considered a hub (a site that contains many links to good authority sites on a particular topic) or an authority (a site containing information on a topic that is pointed to by many good hubs}. With this method getting links from directories indexed, is the first step to becoming an authority.

[seth_wilde]

Oops, forgot to answer the second question....

"If I submit the directory URL it will also spider all of the competition sites as well, is there a way around this"

As far as I know there is no way around this, But unless your already ranking very well, this shouldn't be too much of a factor, you'll gain much more than you'll loose....

[Brett_Tabke]

That is a very good summation of the the situation seth. The directory link far outweights any negative value that may occur because of your competitions link. Besides, most of the search engines spider the directories anyway.

[WebGuerrilla]

If you don't want to submit the page with your direct competitors on it, you can submit a regional listing instead. Usually, you won't have much competition in a regional category.

However, as Brett pointed out, most spiders will eventually find and index the main category. It's just a matter of time.

[Brett_Tabke]

WG, that is a good tip. I don't give enough thought to that myself. I have so few pages that are actually regional that I don't get into the specifics that much.