Top Internet Directories:

Directory listings are the big indexes such as Yahoo, Open Directory & About.com (formerly The Mining Company) are a great source of hits. But most people don't properly submit to them, and even if they do get in, their listings are substandard.

Proper submission to these indexes is becoming even more crucial because there is a pronounced trend towards using "human-edited" indexes in search results. What does this mean This means that more and more everyday, search engines are starting to think like us humans. The best way to lay it down is to say, if you dont like it, most likely the search engine will drop the site ranking. Also, many of the major search engines are starting to use Open Directory index listings in their search results, making it the #2 most important place to list your site.

Another thing to consider is that more and more search engines are using link-popularity as a ranking method (Google is the originator of this technique). Under this system the ranking of your site depends on how many other pages link to yours, and how important those links are. That means that a secondary benefit of getting a link on major indexes is that it can improve your ranking on some search engines. You can even hurry this along by, for example, submitting the pages containing your listings to the search engines!

For example, these days, everyone's favorite search engine is Google, and getting your site listed in Yahoo! and Open Directory can do wonders for your Google "Page Rank". In fact, it can in some cases be cost effective to pay the $299 a year to maintain a Yahoo! listing just because of the boost it gives you in Google.

Furthermore, if your site falls into one of the following categories, or uses one of the following techniques. The major indexes consider such sites to be spam and will not list them:

Affiliate sites with same or similar content but a different site designs.
Mirror sites. Submitting mirror URLs to different categories is also considered spam. Multi-lingual sites are acceptable as long as the URL resolves to the appropriate language.
Sites that use redirects or any type of bait-and-switch practice. Using frames to hide a real URL, commonly referred to as "poor man's cloaking," is also considered spam.
Sites whose sole purpose is to drive traffic to affiliate links or sites that contain these types of links.
Sites that are repeatedly resubmitted (over 5 times) without being accepted.

In addition, the major search engines are actively penalizing/banning sites that employ the following techniques:

Web pages that are built primarily for the search engines and not your target audience, especially machine-generated pages.
Pages that contain hidden text and hidden links.
"Great quantity and little value" pages.
Link farming and link spamming, particularly free-for-all (FFA) links.
Cloaking, a practice in which the search engine and the end user do not view the same page.
Sites with numerous, unnecessary host names (i.e. poker.abc.com, blackjack.abc.com, etc.).
Excessively cross-linking sites to artificially inflate a site's apparent popularity.
Affiliate spam.

People who repeatedly submit spam sites to the big guys have not only been blacklisted, but in some cases, their previously submitted (and legitimate) sites have been removed.