Check directories before submitting to them

Many small directories offer nothing of value to the sites that they list. Some even offer real danger to them. So if you are thinking about submitting your site to a directory, make these checks before you do.

(1) Place your mouse over a few listings. If the status bar shows a url that belongs to the directory, then the link will not be attributed to your site by the engines, and being listed is of no value. In fact it may even be dangerous to your site.*

(2) Check the robots.txt file to make sure that search engine spiders are not disallowed from crawling the pages where the listings are shown.

(3) Check the meta tags of a typical listings page to make sure that spiders are not prevented from indexing the page, and/or from following links from it:- meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow". If it says noindex and/or nofollow, forget it - it's no good to you.

(4) Check a few typical links. If the anchor tag contains rel="nofollow", then the link won't be followed or counted by the engines.

(5) Check a few linked-to urls. If they do not link directly to the listed pages (the target pages), they can be dangerous.* The status bar can be made to show whatever the designer wants it to show, so don't rely on it - check the source code.

* Links from other sites can be dangerous because of the way that Google and MSN handle 302 redirects - they sometimes attribute the target page's assets to the linking page, and the linking page can end up taking the place of the target page in the search results. Most small directories that do not link directly to the target page, use the 302 method, and are dangerous to the listed pages.



A Man who do no mistakes does nothing