Regardless of what you have probably read or heard recently, manual directory submission backlink strategy can still be a good way to lay some solid links into your site’s profile, but you have to be smart about which directories you go out and associate your site with. When we’re doing SEO in Kansas City for our clients, our link advocates do employ some high quality directory links, depending on the type of client. Although these make up a minority of the links you need overall for a good profile, it’s some nice kindling for the fire.

See, directories on the web should accomplish exactly what the name implies, be a useful directory of links to quality sites. Unfortunately, when word got out that these directories provided a great place to easily syphon page rank (and even lay in some quality anchor text), both the users and the site owners quickly became abusers. The users began spamming any directory they could find, going as far as creating bots to spam directories for them, and the site owners, quickly realizing the opportunity, began focusing on selling “high profile” or “high quality” links on their site for some quick and easy cash. As we all know, purchasing links is against Google’s webmaster guidelines, so these types of sites quickly started seeing major penalties and the whole community jumped off the directory bandwagon for a while. Google however is actually cool with directories, as long as they are used appropriately and add value to the web.

So, how do we know which directories are good and which are bad? Here are a few simple things to look for:

1. The directory has more ads than content. If the directory appears to just be jam packed with advertisement text and banner ads, with little focus on driving you to those quality sites they should have in their directory, this probably isn’t worth your time.

2. Is the directory indexed by Google? If a directory is a major offender Google will not index the directory at all. The first quick step is to simply do a search in Google for that directory’s URL (www.directorynamehere.com). If you don’t get anything then stay clear, as it’s obviously getting a heavy penalty from Google. For an even more in-depth search to see how much of the site Google is indexing, perform a quick search typing this: site:directorynamehere.com and you’ll get a decent look at just how much of the site is being indexed by Google. The more results typically the better.

3. The directory doesn’t function properly, has broken images everywhere, etc. If it appears that this directory has gone into autopilot then people have probably been spamming it for a long time, or nobody is getting in because there is nobody around to edit the submission requests.

4. Dive into the directory and look to see who you will be sharing the page with in your category. Most directories default to alphabetical order so you can get a good idea of where you’re going to land. Do these neighbors look like people you want to be associated with? Are there a bunch of broken links on the page? Adding your website to a bad neighborhood of links will not do your site much good at all.

5. Be careful of any directories with words like: free, submit, rank, SEO, links, and so on in the name, URL, or used heavily on the site. Again, remember that we’re looking for quality directories to associate our business with, not to game the search engines.

6. Lastly, this one is pretty simple: are there just too many dang links in the directory? If there are thousands and thousands of links in your category within the directory, or there are hundreds of links on each page in that category, chances are there isn’t much juice left to flow through yours.

Make sure to spend some time writing a good, honest and objective description of your business so that you’re more likely to get included. Just have some patience, the good directories take some time to get into because they are human edited.