• Big Oak SEO , Thursday, September 4, 2008 1:16 PM

Will Paoletto argues that there's a consensus among many in the search community about the value of directories and the links they provide--namely, that they're worthless. "I don't know where the people who seeded this myth (or the parrots who repeat it in lockstep) came from, but I know how to make them flip their opinion straight away," he says. "By using logic."

For example, a dig into the linking structure of a client's site (using Google Webmaster Tools) showed 20 backlinks from a given directory. Paoletto had tagged and submitted a number of the site's pages to the directory, and Google had subsequently indexed and cached each page. "The fact that Google spiders this directory often and felt it was important enough to show as 20 backlinks to a site in Webmaster tools would indicate to a rational person that Google trusts this directory a great deal," he says.

He adds that while Google has been penalizing link-selling or otherwise spammy directories, it can't just devalue all paid directory links in the same way that it could the links on a single site, simply because links are too integral to the way it indexes and ranks sites from across the Web.

"Google likes links surrounded by similar links," Paoletto says. "And that's the essence of what a page in a web directory is-it's just a collection of links surrounded by similarly-themed links."

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