SEO lab > Directory articles
The Rise of the Directory
by Brian Turner of britecorp.
On November 12th 2003, what seemed like an otherwise minor and innocuous update began on Google. Everybody in the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) community was completely unprepared for the major upset that was about to happen. What changed was the face of Google forever.
Within two weeks the story had even made world press agencies such as Reuters and the BBC. You may even have heard of the name of the update: it was called "Florida".
What Florida did was to abandon the normal way that Google indexes websites – where links and anchor text alone could be used indiscriminately to "Google Bomb" sites into listings for keywords.
Such as when the Whitehouse biography of George W. Bush was Google Bombed into returning first for the keywords "miserable failure". That made the world press as well.
Now all that will be a thing of the past.
There is no consensus within the SEO community as to what the exact changes are – much of everything is speculation – as SEO actually always was.
One strong idea is that the new way of ranking is based on some form of an "expert system", such as Google's Hilltop algorithm.
What Hilltop does is to determine the relevancy of pages for the results, based on cross-referencing with a pre-determined set of "expert documents".
That means off-topic links are on their way out of usefulness. That means "expert" pages need to be found.
Luckily, Google has publicly published papers on expert systems. One in particular is called "Hilltop". And Hilltop very clearly states what an "expert" page is:
Experts in our definition are directories of links pointing to many non-affiliated sites. This is an indication that these pages were created for the purpose of directing users to resources, and hence we regard their opinion as valuable. Additionally, in computing the level of relevance, we require a match between the query and the text on the expert page which qualifies the hyperlink being considered. This ensures that hyperlinks being considered are on the query topic. For further accuracy, we require that at least 2 non-affiliated experts point to the returned page with relevant qualifying text describing their linkage.
How the term "directory" is quantified is, of course, a matter of conjecture. But what it almost certainly means that directories in themselves can almost certainly deliver a special relevance in an expert system, such as Hilltop.
Welcome to the rise of directories.
Once upon a time directories were of limited importance: they generated little human traffic for starters. And the PageRank of individual pages often seemed so low that the arduous and often expensive submissions process could seem like too much effort and expense.
Not any more.
Google has now, in its infinite wisdom, decided that at least certain directories are important. Very important. In fact, having links in multiple directories now needs to be one of the cornerstones of optimising sites for search engines.
Will Google give the same respect to every directory? Almost certainly not. But where is the dividing line drawn? That's Google's secret.
You should look to ensure that you start submitting your links to a wide range of directories. There's a very good starter list of Free Directories here.
Generally, though, it seems that directory links may now have special value – at least, in the eyes of Google.
It's up to webmaster's now to take advantage of that value.
