Directory links are links from web directories, these are web sites that collect and organize web sites into categories for easier browsing. Directories were most popular during the period prior to search engines becoming the main method of finding information. Although they are used less today, they are still a valuable source links and traffic to your web site.

Types of directories

There are two main types of directories, general directories and niche directories. General directories will include any web site within their large list of categories, which may range from arts and literature to shopping sites. Niche directories only accept sites that are within it’s niche or theme. For example, a jewelry directory will list only web sites with jewelry related content and therefore, will not list a lingerie site.

Types of directory submissions

There are two types of submissions to directories, paid submissions and free submissions.

A paid submission is when there is an exchange of money for the review of a web site submission. Paying for a submission doesn’t necessarily mean that a site will be accepted into the directory. Some directories will refund the submission fee if the site is not listed in the directory. Other directories will keep the submission fee even though the site does not pass their review to be included in their directory. Submission fees can also be a recurring fee or a one time fee. Most paid submission directories will usually guarantee the review of the web site within, typically, 48-72 hours.

A free directory submission, as the name suggests, costs no money to submit your site. Some directories with free submission will require a link back to the directory. Most directories with free submissions will not have a guarantee that the submission will be reviewed within a given time period. For this reason, many free directory submissions may take months, even years before the submission gets reviewed.

Not all directories are created equal!

There are many directories that are spammy, created for the purpose of illiciting one way links for link exchanges. Such directories will often accept any directory submission as long as a reciprocal link can be provided and they typically don’t check the quality of the site being submitted. Such directories are often not worth submitting to.

However, there are also many reputable directories. A reputable directory will review the submission and the web site proposed for inclusion into their directory. They won’t include just any site into their directory, but sites that have unique content. There are many reputable directories, the top two being:

1. Dmoz.org - Also known as the Open Directory Project or ODP. Dmoz only accepts free submissions. Links from Dmoz.org are static html links. Submissions are reviewed by volunteers so it may take anywhere between 1 week and 2 years to get listed, if you get listed. There is no notification of whether the site submitted will be listed, or when it will be listed.
2. Yahoo! Directory - Yahoo’s directory will accept both free submissions and paid submissions. The fee for paid submissions are annually recurring. Links from Yahoo’s directory uses redirected links, but it’s thought that search engines such as Google can still determine that your site is listed in Yahoo! Directory and this may work in your favor in terms of ranking in search engines.

Link exchanges are a great way to get links to your web site. However, it is a time consuming and tedious process and there are more than a few webmasters that are involved in shady practices when it comes to link exchanges.

The time consuming and tedious aspect of link exchanges are:

1. Link hunting - finding suitable web sites to engage in link exchanges.
2. Contacting the webmaster for a link exchange - through an email or link submission form.
3. Putting up links to the web site you are requesting a link exchange.
4. Waiting for the webmaster to respond.
5. Checking periodically for your link on your partner’s site.

Out of the above list of time consuming and tedious aspects of link exchanges, the last point, “Checking periodically for your link on your partner’s site” would take the most amount of time. Checking for your link on your partner’s site involves more than just looking for the presence of your link on their site (which also takes a great deal of time since they may move or remove your link and not tell you). You need to check that the link they use for your web site is a valid static HTML link and that the webmaster is not using any shady link exchange practices.

Shady link exchange practices includes:

1. The use of meta tag “NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW”
2. The use of javascript
3. The use of redirects
4. Using robots.txt to block link pages or directories from search engine robots
5. Orphaned link pages or directories
6. Using new attribute “rel=nofollow”
7. Using frames or iframes

The time consuming and tedious aspect of link exchanges is one of the reasons why many internet businesses choose to buy text links. Buying text links is the quickest and most efficient method to obtaining thousands of links to your web site in a short amount of time. This can greatly and quickly boost your link popularity and search engine rankings.

The meta tags are in the header of a web page, that is, between the <head> tags. There are some webmasters out there that use the meta tag <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW"> on their links page or directory. This means that search engine robots will not index (NOINDEX) or follow (NOFOLLOW) the links on that page.

The use of <meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW"> is most commonly seen during link exchanges where webmasters try to retain their PageRank by instructing search engine robots not to index or follow their links pages or links directory.

Impact of this meta tags on link exchanges

A link on a web page using robots meta tag is not completely useless. If your link is on a web page that uses this robots meta tag, your link would not be counted towards your web site’s link popularity. However, visitors may still find your web site through this link.

Detecting meta “NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW”

Detecting this robots meta tags is quite simple. The meta tag can be clearly seen in the source code of the web page. Look within the <head> tags near the top of the source code.

The use of links in javascript is usually to prevent search engine robots from spidering these links. Many search engine robots are not able to follow javascript links. This may mean that a link within javascript is not properly "seen" by the robots and therefore cannot be followed to your web site.

An example of a link in javascript:

The above example will be displayed in javascript enabled web browsers as follows:

Impact of links in javascript on link exchanges

As with the use of the meta tag "NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW", a link within javascript is not completely useless. They would not count towards your web site's link popularity, however visitors can still click on the link to visit your web site.

Detecting links in javascript

Links in javascript can be easily detected in the source code of web pages, however it may take some time and a little understanding of HTML and javascript. Using the example above, look for links within the <script> tags.

Link popularity is tied to the URL of a web page. To build your web site’s link popularity, you will need links pointing to the exact URL of your pages.

Search engines typically will not pass on any weight to the landing page of a redirected link. In other words, a tracking or redirected link doesn’t count towards your web site’s link popularity. However, search engines will pass on weight to the landing page of a link that uses permanent or 301 redirects.

The use of redirected links is usually for tracking purposes. With link exchanges, it is not unusual for a link partner to track how many visitors click on the link to your web site. It’s fairly unusual for a webmaster to use redirected links solely for the purpose of trying to cheat another webmaster during a link exchange.

An example of a redirected link is as follows:

Which will result in the following link in your web browser.

The above example shows the link that isn’t a static HTML link, but a redirected link. The link passes through the page redirectedlinkstest.php, which then sends the web browser to the final landing page. In this case, LinkTutorial.com’s home page.

Impact of redirected links on link exchanges

Depending on the redirection used, redirected links often renders that link to your web site virtually useless, in terms of link popularity. Your web site would miss out on the search engine benefits from redirected links.

However, a link exchange involving a redirected or tracking link is still useful in terms of visitors. Your web site would still get the benefit of visitors coming to your web site from your link partner’s web site.

Detecting redirected links

Detecting redirected links is fairly simple. There’s no need to view the source code of a web page. Simple click on the link and if you see a series of URLs in the status bar of your web browser, that link is a redirected link.

Use the above example to test the detection of redirected links.

Robots.txt files are used to instruct search engine robots on which areas of a web site they should not visit or index. For example, you can instruct robots not to view or index your image folder.

This file can be used by shady webmasters to instruct search engine robots not to visit or index the links pages or directory of their web site.

Impact of robots.txt on link exchanges

For link exchanges, the use of robots.txt means that your link on the link partner’s page would not be visited, indexed or followed to your web site by search engine robots. This practice is more “sneaky” than using meta tags, javascript or redirected links.

Robots.txt will not stop visitors from coming to your site from this link.

Detecting robots.txt

You will need a little understanding about robots.txt to detect their use. Firstly, visit the robot.txt file, it’s in the root directory of a web site. For example,

If this page does not exist, it means the web site doesn’t use a robots.txt file, therefore there’s no chance of the webmaster disallowing search engine robots. If it does exist, look for:

This means that the web site will instruct ALL search engine robots (User-agent: *) not to visit or index the entire site (Disallow: /).

The “User-agent” may be targeted to specific search engine robots, for example

The “Disallow” may also be targeted specifically to the links directory, for example

The disallow example will disallow all pages that start with http://www.[domain name].com/links

Orphaned pages are web pages that are not being referenced or linked to by another web page. Orphaned link pages are harder to detect than the other shady practices employed by some webmasters such as meta tags, javascript links, redirected links and robots.txt files.

Impact of orphaned link pages on link exchanges

Webmasters may orphaned link pages to prevent both visitors and search engines from finding links to other web sites. A link to your web site from an orphaned links page is completely useless in terms of search engine rankings, link popularity and increasing traffic through visitors coming to your site through that link.

Detecting orphaned link pages.

There are two (2) main methods of detecting orphaned link pages, browsing the web site or using Google’s search.

The first method involves browsing the web site to try and find the links page where the link to your web site resides. This method is often slow as a web site’s structure is not always well thought out and browsing to the links page can be frustrating when the links section is not obvious.

The second method makes use of Google’s search. Go to Google and type in the URL of the links page into the search box. If one result is returned, it means that Googlebot, Google’s search engine robot, has found the page and therefore is unlikely to be orphaned.

rel=”nofollow”, is said to be the next biggest thing to be used by shady webmasters engaging in reciprocal link exchanges. This attribute was introduced by Google as a means to prevent the problem of comment spamming in weblogs, also called “Blogs”, and it looks to be adopted by all other major search engines such as Yahoo! and MSN.

“rel” is an attribute, not a tag

rel=”nofollow” has been inaccurately called a HTML tag. It is in fact an attribute that can be added to HTML tags, similar to adding the attribute “width” to HTML tags such as <IMG> or <TABLE>. The attribute rel=”nofollow” is used on individual anchor tags <A> for links.

Purpose of rel=”nofollow”

Any link with this attribute will indicate to search engine robots that the landing page may not be approved by the web site listing this link and therefore the link will not contribute to the link popularity or ranking of the landing page.

Example link using rel=”nofollow”

An example of the use of this attribute in a link is displayed below. The resulting link, while still visible to visitors, will not contribute to Google’s link popularity, PageRank or search engine ranking (not that they really need any).

Impact on link exchanges

While this attribute is clearly beneficial, especially for preventing spammers from abusing Blogs, guestbooks and other public areas where comments can be submitted, one of the concerning consequences is shady webmasters using it for the links on their links pages and directories. A link using the attribute rel=”nofollow” is not completely worthless, visitors can still come to your web site through this link, however you will be losing out when it comes to link popularity and search engine rankings.

Another possible abuse of rel=nofollow is the use of this attribute applied to the link pointing to the links page or directory. By applying rel=nofollow in this way, the outgoing links on the links page appears valid, however, because the links page is not “approved” by the page linking to it, the links page will not receive PageRank or link popularity. Hence a link on such a page would not pass on any benefits in terms of link popularity and search engine rankings.

More information

Looking for the source of this article? Read Google’s Blog on Preventing Comment Spam. You may also be interested in what MSN and Yahoo! has to say about this new attribute.

Learn how to detect rel=”nofollow” for Safari on Mac OS X using a javascript bookmark. You can also detect rel=”nofollow” on Firefox for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

rel=”nofollow”, is a new attribute for the HTML tag <A> for links. This attribute can be detected in your Safari browser using the following javascript code as a bookmark. Please note that this javascript code only works for Macintosh computers using the Safari web browser.

How to detect the attribute rel=”nofollow” in Safari browsers:

1. Open up Safari
2. From your menu, go to “Bookmarks” then “Show All Bookmarks”
3. From your menu, go to “Bookmarks” then “Add Bookmark”
4. Name the bookmark as you wish, something like “rel=nofollow”
5. Select the bookmark folder “Bookmarks Bar” from the drop down menu, then click on “Add”
6. Change the address of the bookmark to:

(Important: Please remove the line breaks - this javascript code is meant to be one line of code)

Testing the bookmark

1. Visit our page, Attribute rel=”nofollow”
2. Click on your new bookmark. You should see 4 links with a red border around them. These links are using the rel=”nofollow” attribute. See below image:

Don’t have Safari on your Mac OS X yet? Download Safari today! It’s the fastest browser for Mac OS X.

This guide can be used to detect the use of the attribute rel=”nofollow” on Firefox browsers in any computer, whether it is on a PC, Linux or Macintosh computer. The rel=”nofollow” attribute can be highlighted in your Firefox browser by adding one line to your userContent.css file. The userContent.css file is used to change the appearance of web pages in Firefox. This step by step guide will show you how to modify the userContent.css file to show the rel=”nofollow” links highlighted in red.

How to detect the attribute rel=”nofollow” using the Firefox browser:

1. Quit Firefox and go to the following directory (NB xxx is a random string of eight characters):
   • For PCs using Windows XP / 2000: C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxx.default\chrome
   • For PCs using Windows 95 / 98 / ME: C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxx.default\chrome
   • For Linux computers: ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxx.default/chrome
   • For Macintosh (MAC OS X) computers: ~/Library/ApplicationSupport/Firefox/
Profiles/xxx.default/chrome
2. There should be an example file called userContent-example.css, rename this file to userContent.css (remove -example)
3. Open up your new userContent.css file and add the following line:
   a[rel~="nofollow"] { border: thin dashed firebrick! important; background-color: rgb(255, 200, 200)! important; }
4. Save and close the file

Testing Firefox to see rel=”nofollow” highlighted in red.

1. Open Firefox and visit Attribute rel=”nofollow”
2. Firefox should automatically highlight 4 links in red. These are the links that are using the attribute rel=”nofollow”. See below image:

Don’t have Firefox? Download Firefox - it’s free and comes in many languages for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux i686. Learn how to customize your userContent.css and userChrome.css files for FireFox.