SEO Business Solutions and Web Directories

Why request inclusion in web directories if they are losing their relevance?

On May 14th, SEO Book commented on the fact that the directory JoeAnt is now a PageRank 3. We have submitted hundreds of sites to hundreds of directories. For sites at the lower end of the quality spectrum, we simply would not submit them to JoeAnt, because we knew they would not list them. Many of those same lower quality sites were accepted in other directories like Business.com, DMEGS and the Yahoo! Directory.
However it is not surprising to us that JoeAnt was dropped to a PageRank 3. Nick Stamoulis that same morning said that after all, it is a paid directory, which means your link is a paid link and we all know how Google feels about those for Search Engine Optimization. In fact, we do all we can to stay away from paid directories and link farms.
DMOZ, on the other hand, still gets a nod of respect from Google. Even though Google no longer needs data from DMOZ in order to index websites, it still crawls the human edited directory and uses the information. If it were up to us, we would lower DMOZ’s PageRank and give paid directories like JoeAnt a higher PageRank. But, of course, it’s not up to us, is it?
Yesterday, DMOZ announced that it has had visitors from over 200 countries. Are you surprised? We’re not. It’s a venerable website with lots of time and history on its side. They’ve been around a long time which Google and other search engines seem to love. We’d be surprised if they didn’t have that many countries in their referrer bin.
We’ve said for a long time now that directories are losing relevance because of other factors taking place on the Internet and supplanting the usefulness of directories. Well, it isn’t entirely so. In fact, to a certain degree, we believe that general directories are a lot less important than they used to be for Search Engine Optimization, but haven’t entirely lost their relevance. However, with the coming of other marketing tools like blogging, social bookmarking, social networking and RSS, directory listings just seem so ponderous and monolithic. DMOZ is a perfectly good example. You submit your site on DMOZ and have to wait 9 months to a year for your site to be listed. In the meantime, you could have built up thousands of inbound links using different means. Then why bother at all with DMOZ? The answer is simple but truly: Since DMOZ is still loved by Google, it makes sense to request inclusion in the directory, even if it takes a year to be included. An inclusion in a directory with a PR of 8 is the eventual payoff. We would also add that it pays to have as many inbound links as possible.
Even though directories, in general, are losing their relevance, SEO Business Solutions thinks that not requesting inclusion of your site in the DMOZ is not a good Search Engine Optimization practice.