What is a Web Directory?
What is exactly a web directory? If I were to define it in layman’s terms, I would say it’s a bunch of links categorized by topics. Yahoo! Directory can serve as an example: http://dir.yahoo.com. The original purpose of the web directories was to provide human-edited quality content. A person would go and search a web directory for the sites he or she is interested in but only in a particular area, e.g. business, accounting, etc. But do you ever visit a web directory to search for something? Your answer would probably be never or rarely. There are exceptions but we’ll get back to them later.
Web directories found a new meaning when Google, the largest search engine on the Internet, introduced its algorithm, which relies heavily on backlinks for ordering its search results. The more links a particular site has going to it, the higher the site ranks in the search results. Now, one thing I want to mention is that not only the quantity of the backlinks matters but quality as well. Actually, quality is even more important than quantity, and having both makes for a great combination. Another important factor is that other search engines started to rely on backlinks as well.
