In digitalpoint forums, someone posted about Web Directories being garbage. While I cannot completely agree with him that this is so, there are a lot of directories which are in fact nothing more than link farms. Yes, those are garbage. I have seen “directories” with just thousands upon thousands of links, without much content. And they are basically useless to anyone.

However, there are a lot of directories which are not garbage. They are very useful, both in terms of getting rankings and traffic. And some directories can help your new site get indexed faster. But for me, I doubt that general web directories are ever good at driving traffic to their listings. Niche directories on the other hand, will be a good source of targetted traffic for their listings. Why? Search engines are rather bad at finding these kinds of sites, thus a human edited niche directory will be more of a value to searchers and visitors.

It would be interesting to note that since Google and their links started to play a huge part of our Internet, web directories have evolved from just listing sites on a topic or a subject to an powerful SEO tool. So, another point to directories. You may think that I am biased to directories because I own 2 directories myself, but in all seriousness, directories will remain an important part of the Internet till Search Engines come up with a foolproof way to find relevant results.