Do you manage the Automotive SEO for your dealership and are debating if you should add your website to a directory or not ?
The short answer is yes, but you need to be very careful what directory you use. Whenever Google looks at a directory as useful to users they analyze the value gained from them, in other words, does the directory go out and find their entries on their own or do they only wait for people to come to them. How much do they charge and what is the editorial service that is being charged . If the directory cost $50 and everybody who applies in the directory automatically gets in for that price there is not as much editorial oversight as the Yahoo directory where people do get rejected. So if there is no editorial "value add" that is much closer to a paid link which is a No No for SEO purposes.
If you look at the Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines they used to have a guideline that said "submit your site to directories" which just caused the creation of fly-by-night directories which would ask for $50 to get your entry automatically added. Google ended up taking out that mention from their guidelines.
According to Matt Cutts, Search Quality Group at Google, Yahoo Directory does a good job with editorial discretion by actually doing a review and rejecting a significant number of entries that are low quality.
He provides a few rules of thumb to think about when looking at a directory:
- Does the directory reject urls? If every url passes a review, the directory gets closer to just a list of links or a free-for-all link site.
- What is the quality of urls in the directory? Suppose a site rejects 25% of submissions, but the urls that are accepted/listed are still quite low-quality or spammy. That doesn’t speak well to the quality of the directory.
- If there is a fee, what’s the purpose of the fee? For a high-quality directory, the fee is primarily for the time/effort for someone to do a genuine evaluation of a url or site.
