Anilrgowda

With all the speaking of SEO Friendly directories, I think it’s important that people know what a SEO friendly directory is.
I’m going to go into what some of the common, standard beliefs are as well as a little bit of my own thoughts regarding these “SEO Friendly” directories.
A SEO friendly directory should:

• Provide a static, one way link back to the original website (no redirects, funky javascript, or cloaking going on)
• Use the anchor text that was input by the submitter of the website to the directory

In addition to this, a seo friendly directory should not employ the use of the rel=nofollow attribute to the submitted websites nor use meta tags or the robots.txt file to otherwise hinder the crawling of links by search engine robots for submitted websites to these directories.
My own personal flair: when I am submitting a personal website to a directory I tend to look at the overall quality of the directory. At least quality in my opinion.

• Do they accept submissions from junk websites?
• Do they keep related websites grouped together, or do they dump a bunch of non-related links together?

Something that makes me consider a directory as not search engine friendly are the two questions above. If I visit a directory and I see a link for a made for adsense pharmacy website in the same category as a webmaster forum: I immediately know that this is not the type of directory where I want my website endorsed. This is a personal decision, and may not reflect the people that think along the lines of “it’s about quantity of backlinks, not quality”. To me, these “directories” are not much different than a FFA pages, and hold very little value for the search engine optimization process.
Undoubtedly others will feel different about this, and I’d love to hear some opinions about it.