Is Google Taking Another Look at Directory Links? Change is a Constant.

If there’s one thing you can count on in the world of search engine optimization, it’s change.  What works this year might be useless next year.  Sure, there are a few things you can do that should always work (great content, frequent updating, etc.), but everything else is subject to change.

Take linking, for example.  Links have long been the lifeblood of good off-site SEO and that’s unlikely to change any time soon.  The way search engines evaluate inbound links to your site, however, is subject to change.  The engines have long been trying to perfect the way they evaluate links to insure that they’re legitimate “votes of confidence” for your site and that has made several old-school strategies just as useless as excessive keyword stuffing.  Thing “FFA link pages” and you’ll understand just how different things are today from where they were a few years ago.

We might be witnessing another change right now.

If you looked at the Google webmaster guidelines a few months ago, you’d see that Google recommended submitting your site to pertinent directories.  Google has long relied on DMOZ (the Open Directory Project) and other directory links to help determine the way it ranks sites.

That’s led many webmasters to submit their sites to a wide variety of directories in pursuit of inbound links.  It’s a popular strategy and there are literally thousands of directories out there who are willing to offer a link to almost any submitted site.  

Google, however, has made a change.  That line about submitting your site to directories?  It’s gone.  They removed it from their webmaster guidelines.  As a result, many in the SEO biz are arguing that Google may be devaluing all of those directory links floating around out there.  Paid directories themselves are falling off in rank.  

Although those who claim Google has never valued many of the “lower quality” directories in the first place, it is possible that we’re witnessing another change in how the search engines will be treating the currency of SEO, inbound links.