Web directories have been around since the beginning of the World Wide Web in the early 1990′s and are still recognized as an important channel for advertising businesses online. People often get web directories and search engines mixed up. The difference between a search engine like Google and web directories is that Google uses a web crawler to automatically index websites to show up in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), while a web directory organizes links under various categories and sub-categories.

Get Indexed Quicker in the Search Engines

When search engines crawl directory websites any new entries within those directories also get crawled and indexed. Directories that are deemed authoritative by search engines like Google are crawled regularly, finding new website links to index which are then ranked to appear in the search results. If you are launching a new website, you should seriously consider submitting to website directoríes to speed up the process of getting indexed into Google.

Raise Your Positions in Google

As many website owners should know the more quality links to your website that you obtain, the more favorably Google will rank your website. Website Directories are a great source for one-way or reciprocal links. Well maintained directories will place your link in an appropriate category or sub-category, meaning that the directory’s human moderators agree that your website is about what your website claims to be about and is useful to human beings.

Drive Traffic to Your Website

Having a listing on a popular, high traffic website directory can also bring you website traffic. You can usually judge whether a web directory receives much traffic from looking at its Alexa rank. This can be found simply by going to www.alexa.com and entering the directory’s domain name into the search field. The lower the “Alexa rank” the more visits the website gets. You can also get a “Country Rank” that indicates how much traffic it gets per country. If the Alexa rank is 100,000 or less, you can be confident that you will get some traffic from it.

How to Pick Good Directories from Bad Directories

Good website directories allow you to enter your preferred link title that best describes what your website is about. The link title, or anchor text, is an important factor in determining where your site appears for certain search terms in Google’s search results.

Good website directories are human edited, meaning that links are not approved automatically. This means that a directory moderator will review your website before making the listing live and won’t approve your website if it does not meet the directory’s quality guidelines.

Many website directories that were previously actively moderated and regularly updated are now pretty much dormant. One way to determine this is to see if the directory shows link statistics on the number of links approved and the number of links awaiting review. If the number of links awaiting approval is vastly larger than the total number of published links, it’s probably a waste of time submitting a listing.

Good website directories pass Google Page Rank through links to your website within their directory listings, but there are directories out there that prevent this from happening. They do this by using a tag in their links called a “nofollow attribute.” If the link to your website contains this tag, it is rendered almost useless to you.

Good directory websites do not accept links to rubbish websites (link farms and websites with nothing but affiliate or advertising links) or to sites that are otherwise not useful to real humans. A directory worth its SEO salt should also not allow links that redirect to another site.

Good directory websites require manual submission. Avoid automated directory submission software because there is a good chance that any directories that accept automated software driven submission are not going benefit your website.

Google, Paid Links and Directories

There is a lot of confusion about Google’s policy of penalizing websites for buying links. This is aided by the fact that Google does not really have a clear policy on paid links. Should you avoid paying for links from website directories?

From what employees of Google have indicated, human-edited website directories are generally okay with Google because there is editorial review. The directory is not considered to be selling the link, just the review and the listing service.

Manual Directory Submission Services

Manually submitting a website to online directoríes is a time consuming, seemingly pointless task. It’s important to be discerning about the directories that you submit to in order to make sure that it will help your website rather than waste your time. There are numerous manual directory submission services available these days that can do all the manual submission for you. A problem with a lot of these is that you need to be able to see the results. Also, it can take days, weeks, or even months for many submissions to go live and the quality of the directories submitted to can vary.

If you don’t have time for manually submitting your website to the directories and the benefits that your website can receive from such efforts, talk to an SEO expert. They can either perform this service as part of an overall SEO strategy, or identify a quality web directory submission service provider to use.

Remember when Bing launched its recipe results? Now Google has launched a similar feature with recipe rich snippets. “For example, if you were searching for an easy to make thai mango salad, you can now see user ratings, preparation time, and a picture of the dish directly in search result snippets,” explains Google. It may not be incredibly far-fetched to suggest that maybe Bing’s offering nudged such a feature into development, whether or not Google would admit this

This story isn’t about recipes though. It’s about the major search engines’ quest for gaining or keeping you as a user. It feels like Bing has been around quite a while now, but in reality, it hasn’t even been out for a year. Right out of the box, Bing seemed to make Google want to improve. Google is even in the process of testing redesigned search results pages that borrow some design characteristics from Bing.

Both Google and Bing still have their relevancy issues. We recently looked at an example of a query for “matt cutts” on Google (though we compared them to Yahoo rather than Bing, as Yahoo mentioned the same query in a blog post). Frankly, Google’s results left a bit to be desired. It wasn’t that that they were bad exactly, but personalized results pushed the more relevant results further down the page, and Matt’s Facebook profile was MIA, despite Facebook being one of the most popular sites on the web, a good result for a search on a person’s name (It was in the first few on Yahoo’s results).

Microsoft may like consumers to think that Bing gives all the right answers. Those commercials would certainly seem to suggest they have a leg up over the competition in that regard, but they’ve got their own relevance issues. For example, for an article I was writing recently, I was looking for that site Bing has that showed all of the latest features they’ve released. I couldn’t remember the name of it, so I searched (on Bing) for “latest bing features”. Given Bing’s philosophy of wanting to provide answers, I would expect to easily find what I was looking for through such a query, but instead the first organic result is an article called “The Latest News from Bing” from November of 2009.

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Search Diversifying

In the latest search market reports, Google has lost a little bit of market share. Bing is gaining (and has the potential to gain a lot more for reasons discussed here). Another thing Bing has going for it, or Google has working against it rather, is that search itself is becoming much more diversified as a result of mobile, social media, and geo-location. People are simply using more ways to find the information they’re looking for. It’s not that they’re not using Google anymore. It’s that they’re maybe using it less for certain types of queries. For example, where someone may have once used Google to search for a movie showtime, maybe they now have an app for that on their phone.

Is a Bingized Yahoo Good for Yahoo Search?

At some point in the near future, Bing’s results will be taking over Yahoo’s results to some extent. While most will agree that the Microsoft-Yahoo deal will be good for search advertising. Another question would be is it good for people who use Yahoo to search? Are Bing’s search results better than Yahoo’s? I’m not so sure, looking at the “matt cutts” example. For the “latest bing features” example, however, I can’t say that Yahoo’s results are really any better than Bing’s.

I realize that just looking at a couple of examples is kind of grasping at straws and are hardly representative of all queries in general, but it’s still a question worth pondering. Are Bing’s results better than Yahoo’s? Does it even matter? Will the average Yahoo user even notice a difference?

Google’s Edge in Innovation

Google still seems to have the edge in getting out new and interesting features. Take real-time search. Microsoft and Google both announced deals with Twitter around the same time. Microsoft even had one with Facebook too. While Bing had a separate destination relatively quickly, where users could search Twitter with Bing, they didn’t integrate real-time Twitter results into Bing results themselves. Google did this after a little while with not only Twitter, but many other sources to make up its real-time search results. Just this week, Bing announced that it is starting to include such results, and only from Twitter, and only to a small subset of users in the U.S. Google is even doing Twitter archive search now.

That’s not to say that Bing doesn’t do some things first (like the recipes for example), but Bing has a lot more to prove (and in all fairness, they do regularly release new features). Google is already established. Bing is still trying to win people over.

Google is frequently making acquisitions to better its search technologies. Just this week, Google acquired Pink, to better its Google Goggles product, which lets people search with their phones by simply pointing their cameras toward an object. They recently acquired Aardvark, a social Q&A search service (a space that is growing rapidly – see AnswerBag/MerchantCircle news for one of the latest examples).

Wrapping Up

With regards to relevance, you’re going to find better results on Google, Yahoo, and Bing on a query-by-query basis. In reality, none of them deliver perfect results all the time, and that is why the diversifying of how people search is likely to continue, and for the better. The search engines can work to personalize results all they want, but in the end, it’s the user that personalizes how they search, and right now, it’s not looking like any single search engine is going to control all of that.

Author: Chris Crum

We recently launched a trial, currently limited to the cities of San Jose and Houston, for a new ads feature in local search that allows business owners to enhance their listings. We’ve seen a lot of curiosity about this feature, so I wanted to take this opportunity to provide further information about it for everyone interested in learning more.

These enhanced listings allow business owners to highlight an aspect of their Local Business Center listing that they think best reflects what they have to offer their customers. The business owner can choose to enhance the way their listing appears in search results by including a link to point customers directly to photos, videos, website, coupons, directions, menu or reservations signup. Let’s say a deli owner thinks the huge selection of imported cheeses really makes her deli stand out – she may want to give potential customers a quick way to see the menu on her website or a photo of her display case. Customers who access this relevant information can make an easier, more informed decision about which business to call or visit.

Here’s an example for optometrist in San Jose, CA. Notice the yellow tag below the North Valley Optometry listing with a link to “View photos” of their business and the photo icon placed on the map:

These enhancements are an easy and straightforward way for businesses to emphasize information that may already be available on their Place Pages or websites, and to connect with interested, locally-based potential customers. When the listing shows up in your Google.com or Google Maps search results, the enhancement also appears alongside it. The enhancements do not affect the ranking of LBC listings, and we clearly indicate which parts of the search result are sponsored.

We hope both users and business owners find this feature useful, so we’ll monitor the trial closely and may make changes. Based on the initial results, we may choose to expand it into additional areas. We don’t have a specific timeline to share at the moment but we’ll post again if and when we do. In the meantime, business owners can claim their listing in the Local Business Center, and those located in San Jose and Houston will see an invitation to enhance their listing for a flat fee of $25/month in the dashboard. Interested businesses outside these areas can be notified when enhanced listings come to their area by filling out this form.