SEO (7) Web directories

Web directories

Most search engine spiders use web directories as the seed or starting point for their crawl. A web directory is a human compiled listing of URLs to thousands of websites categorized into different groups. Most well known directories are DMOZ (www.dmoz.org) and Yahoo! Directory (dir.yahoo.com).

DMOZ is the largest and most comprehensive human-edited directory on the internet. Listing a website in DMOZ is free. It takes around 3 weeks to 6 months for a listing to be approved. If the submission is improper there is a good chance that the listing will be denied. Yahoo! Directory is a paid directory with an annual recurring cost of US$ 299 fo commercial sites and US$ 600 for sites with adult content. Yahoo also provides a free listing feature but there is no guarantee whether the listing will be accepted or rejected. Search engines view directory listings as a vote of confidence in web sites [9]. Being listed in either of these directories is crucial since most popular search engines spider these directories and one can be certain that their website will be spidered by the search engine if these directories link to their site.

Search engine relationship chart

Figure 4 illustrates the relationship between major search engines and directories.

One can conclude that:

• DMOZ acts as the seed for Lycos (www.lycos.com), HotBot (www.hotbot.com), AOL Search (search.aol.com), Teoma (www.teoma.com), Google, iWon (www.iwon.com) and Netscape Search (search.netscape.com)
• Yahoo! directory acts as the seed for Yahoo! Search and AltaVista (www.altavista.com)
• Google Adwords (adwords.google.com) provides paid search results to Google Search,HotBot AOL Search, Lycos, Ask Jeeves (www.askjeeves.com), Teoma, iWon, Netscape Search
• Yahoo! Search marketing (searchmarketing.yahoo.com) provides paid search results to Yahoo! Search, AllTheWeb (www.alltheweb.com), AltaVista and MSN Search

to download this article with pictures click here: SEO articles Web directories

source:SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND MARKETING by Binoy Varghese page 13-15

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