Directory Quality for Citation Building
-
Hello All,
Just started to work on a new clients site that has been hit with multiple google penalties. I was looking at their backlink profile and noticed they have numerous links from what seem to be very low quality directory websites. My question is, when building citations and looking for directories to submit to, what makes one directory more credible then another one? If most of them are just publishing links and business information, why does google consider one credible and the other spammy? Clearly with some it's easy to tell if they are credible or not, but with some it is not as easy. Should you only really be submitting to the best of the best or are some lower lever ones ok too? Have read a few things on this topic, but most is older and just want to hear what people have to say on this today. Thanks.
-
No problem.
A big give away is normally the URL, for instance anything with numbers in is a big red flag.
I have just updated our profile as I noticed we hadn't included our websites. Hope you find some useful citations on the list!
J
-
Hey Jamie,
Thanks for the response. Yes I agree that the eye test is usually a good barometer for determining the quality of a site and good to hear this applies to directories as well. I'll check out the post, pretty sure I can find it, thanks for the heads up.
-
Hey jStrong
Generally a lot of web directories are seen as spammy but you can separate the wheat from the chaff by looking at the DA and PA using the Moz toolbar. Normally your first impression will tell you whether you should be leaving a listing or not. My advice would be to stick to well known local directories and ones that are attached to reputable news/media outlets that have enough readership.
Incidentally we have a blog post on our website at the moment with a list of must have citations that are normally our first port-of-call with new websites. PM me if you want the link as i'm not sure if its classed as advertising on the forums.
J
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Can Image Quality In Online Store Effect Main Site SEO?
My client is building a new shopping cart that will be mobile friendly BUT will have terrible image quality - tiny images, with text on them. How will these tiny images impact the SEO on the main site? Should they put the store on the mainsite.com or on a subdomain (store.mainsite.com)? Does google see subdomains as part of the main site? I would think that having thousands of shopping product pages could be beneficial to the main site SEO, as long as the images don't negate the content. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jerrico10 -
How should I handle conflict between custom taxonomy and categories in a directory site?
Hello! I posted about this a week ago but haven't solidly figured it out yet. I'm building a website that is a directory of local therapists. I have categories for my blog and custom taxonomy to classify therapists. My problem is that my categories and my custom taxonomy overlap by necessity. For example I have the category "anxiety therapy" and the custom taxonomy "anxiety". Will this confuse google?...Do you think google will be able to figure out the differences between my blog archives and my therapist listing archives?...even though their names are similar and in a couple of cases the same? should I noindex my categories because the point of my site is to get customers to the directory....not the blog?.....even though the blog has lots of useful content? I should note here that I have my custom taxonomy pages set up so that they will display the 6 most recent blog posts in the corresponding category at the bottom of the page....so maybe that makes noindexing the categories more ok? Thank you for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | angelamaemae0 -
How to gain or build high authority backlinks without content?
P.S. please suggest me the latest tips and tricks along with the known and lesser known facts regarding the niche question.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HuptechWebseo0 -
Should you bother disallowing low quality links with brand/non-commercial anchor text?
Hi Guys, Doing a link audit and have come across lots of low quality web directories pointing to the website. Most of the anchor text of these directories are the websites URL and not comercial/keyword focused anchor text. So if thats the case should we even bother doing a link removal request via google webmaster tools for these links, as the anchor text is non-commercial? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | spyaccounts140 -
Foreign Language Directories
I have a client whose site has each page in multiple languages. each is in specific directories. Needless to say each page is showing up with the same site title, meta data, and content. When my campaigns are crawled they show up as thousands of page errors. Should i add each of these into robots.txt? would this fix the issue of duplicate content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gkellyiii0 -
Mission Possible? You have 3 hours to do Local SEO. Which top 5 sites do you go Social Bookmark, Local Search Engine Submit and Directory List.
Mission Possible? Here is a test. Suppose you had 3 hours (okay 7) to go and submit links, etc, on Social Bookmarking, Local Search Engines and Directories, which top 5 or more of each would you do? (Assuming your on-page is already sweetened). I just got 2 more clients and I need to get started on a few things for each. Thankful for all your advice.............
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Does Disallowing a directory also tell search engines to unindex?
I have a bunch of duplicate pages/duplicate title issues because of Joomla's item/category/menu structures. I want to tell search engines not to crawl, and also to unindex anything in those directories in order to solve the duplicate issues. I thought of disallowing in robots.txt, but then I realized that might not remove the URLs if they've already been indexed. Please help me figure this out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ocularis0 -
When to delete low quality content
If 75% of a site is poor quality, but still accounts for 35% of the traffic to the site, should the content be 404ed? Or, would it be better to move it to a subdomain and set up 301 re-directs? This site was greatly affected by Panda.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0