Thread: What do you find more powerful?

Directory links or Article Directory Links?

Personally I have found the article directory links are often retained as one of the best sources for traffic. So far, it is the best for any site I've done myself, or worked on for others. I would like to know you're thoughts tho, as directories are helpful in many area's.

thx for the ears....and more importantly the imput.

I'd say it's the links to contents that count. Because if you've got say a 500-word article that contains 2 links to your site, it is the links that will make a difference when it comes to SE crawlers, and not quite the content, although that contributes. So by analogy -- the more links, the merrier. However I'd make sure my links have spot-on keywords in them, that reflect the page's content.

I think directory listings have been devalued by search engines, especially paid ones. Articles are of more value because they have the potential to be picked up in many places. Writing articles for link bait is a great strategy.

Article directories are better because the links you get are incontent links unlike directory links which give you links (with same description, meta keywords and meta description) that are found on 100 other directories

Ismail

The well established, older directories still carry weight with the search engines. DMOZ obviously carries a lot of weight, and the Yahoo directory does as well. The interesting thing to me is that where Google tends to devalue paid listings in general, they treat Yahoo directory listings favorably - even though we all pay $199 for the listing. I still think that if you are going to pay for just one directory listing that Yahoo directory is the one to get.
Good luck getting your free DMOZ listing though : )

Originally Posted by DGoldstein

The well established, older directories still carry weight with the search engines. DMOZ obviously carries a lot of weight, and the Yahoo directory does as well. The interesting thing to me is that where Google tends to devalue paid listings in general, they treat Yahoo directory listings favorably - even though we all pay $199 for the listing. I still think that if you are going to pay for just one directory listing that Yahoo directory is the one to get.
Good luck getting your free DMOZ listing though : )

Some directories like yahoo directory hide their listing fee's by calling it a "review fee"; so basically there is no guarantee that you will get listed in the directory.

I prefer submitting articles to article directories.

Article directories are much better than directory links.

I don't see why it needs to be one or the other. Why not both?

There are many directories that are still very valuable in terms of link juice. The biggest problem with any directory is that it is usually only one or two links. Yahoo.com, business.com, dmoz.org, botw.org, and many other directories are very valuable. They are worth every penny of the $200 to $300 you'll spend.

Articles can get syndicated across hundreds, if not thousands, of different sites, and some of those can be pretty valuable sites. (Most will be worthless "scraper" sites, but if you write good content, your article will also get picked up by quality sites with a lot of PR. Most of the article directories are free (or extremely cheap), so in terms of bang for your buck, one might say that they are a better investment, but it will take a lot more articles and a lot more time to get enough of them out there.

If you HAD to pick one or the other, I would say if you have more money than time, do the directories. If you have more time than money, go for the article directories (but plan on doing a lot of them).

With that said, I still come back to my initial question: Why pick just one or the other?

Good point raised Joelrunner. The more backlinks we can get from different sources, the better. Whilst backlinks from article directories may hold more weight than regular directories, a mix of both can only do more good.