What was their significance?

Well, web directories were a great source of backlinks for all kinds of websites. They also helped in getting newly made sites to get indexed by the search engines. Truly, these directories helped a lot in terms of search engine optimization, particularly link building.

Are they losing importance now?

I have researched and it seems that web directories (most especially the free ones) are gradually losing their significance! Well, we can’t deny that they still help in getting indexed and crawled by search engines… but I think that it has stopped there. Sites aren’t getting what they really need — link juice and better search engine rankings.

I believe that some webmasters are also noticing the continuous decrease of web directories’ importance. Here are some things that I have observed in certain webmaster communities:

1. I noticed that people aren’t building web directories any more… well, at least not as many as before.
People must be doing this because they think that directories aren’t the “in” thing for link building any longer. And because of that, webmasters are not going to buy links from directories. I also found out that bidding directories are starting to bid goodbye!

2. Directory submission services aren’t popping out as often as they did before!
Well, a few months ago, threads regarding directory submission services were flooding the forums. Now, they’re going away… they’ve been replaced by social bookmarking services! How dreadful…

Why are they losing importance?

Everything has a reason for happening, and I think that the following things are the main reasons for the “downfall” of web directories.

Google’s penalty for paid links - As many webmasters have experienced, Google has been penalizing websites which are selling links for link juice or PageRank… You do know that a lot of people were buying links from high PR directories, but now that detected paid links aren’t really helping in boosting PageRank or SE rankings, paid (particularly bidding) directories have pretty much lost their purpose.

Lack of directory owners’ efforts - Some of them just purchase a dropped domain and build a directory. Then they add in some categories and approve all paid links! In my opinion, that’s just ridiculous. They don’t even take the time to check the quality of the submitted links. Because of that, a lot of links are stuffed in one page and the “PR juice” isn’t passed any more.

Low number of indexed pages - Believe it or not, most newly made free directories are just built on dropped domains. Most of the time, only the home page is indexed and the categories aren’t even crawled by the search engine spiders… and since it’s like that, the sites which are placed on those pages aren’t getting any benefits from the links.

Conclusion

So there… I think that web directories are gradually losing their significance. I want to know your thoughts about this topic… please leave a comment!

Other posts that you might find interesting:

• Link Building FAQs - 4th Batch
• The Big List of Link Building Tactics
• 5 Ways to Get Your Site Crawled