A lot of discussion has been made about link building. Reciprocal links have had their heyday but are now somewhat discounted by the search engines due to the popularity of link farms and link building software. The new fad is one-way links. Perhaps the best source of these one-way links are directories - basically huge lists of websites. However, there are now so many directories out there that directories have now become the new links pages. Some of these directories charge a fee for inclusion. For example: Metrobix, InYahoo, InGoogle, Geodale, Surfbot, Bivlo, Botseeker, Indextogo, Intoguide, Junglesnoop, Kazlist, Linkrelief, Surfcomet, Trafficlink and Ylink.

Early in my website development when I was struggling to get pages indexed, I paid for inclusion in these and other directories. But, how useful is that inclusion. Take the above examples - most have no pagerank, most are probably not even indexed in the major search engines. So why would you pay to be included in a directory that no search engine knows about?

I’m not saying that directories are useless. There are many out there that will do a webmaster a lot of good - the Yahoo Directory for instance. Another is the Open Directory Project. Before you pay for submission in these or other directories, make sure the directory is worth it. How can you tell? Well, hopefully the directory itself has some sort of page rank. Your link should also be on a page written in HTML - not java code. If you have doubts - choose “View - Source” and see if you can find your link as text within the code. Finally, make sure your directory entry can be found by the search engines. Hopefully the directory is indexed already. If not, you might want to re-think paying much for inclusion.