[Brian Turner]

The rise of the directory: why directories are now more important for Google.

On November 12th 2003, what seemed like an otherwise minor and innocuous update began on Google. Everybody in the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) community was completely unprepared for the major upset that was about to happen. What changed was the face of Google forever.

Within two weeks the story had even made world press agencies such as Reuters and the BBC. You may even have heard of the name of the update: it was called "Florida".

What Florida did was to abandon the normal way that Google indexes websites – where links and anchor text alone could be used indiscriminately to "Google Bomb" sites into listings for keywords.

Such as when the Whitehouse biography of George W. Bush was Google Bombed into returning first for the keywords "miserable failure". That made the world press as well.

Now all that will be a thing of the past.

There is no consensus within the SEO community as to what the exact changes are – much of everything is speculation – as SEO actually always was.

But if there’s one thing many can agree on, it’s that the new way of ranking is based on an "expert system".

What an expert system does is to carefully select pages based on their relevancy, before beginning to rank these against each other.

That means off-topic links are on their way out of usefulness. That means "expert" pages need to be found.

Luckily, Google has publicly published papers on expert systems. One in particular is called "Hilltop". And Hilltop very clearly states what an "expert" page is:

Experts in our definition are directories of links pointing to many non-affiliated sites. This is an indication that these pages were created for the purpose of directing users to resources, and hence we regard their opinion as valuable. Additionally, in computing the level of relevance, we require a match between the query and the text on the expert page which qualifies the hyperlink being considered. This ensures that hyperlinks being considered are on the query topic. For further accuracy, we require that at least 2 non-affiliated experts point to the returned page with relevant qualifying text describing their linkage.

Welcome to the rise of directories.

Once upon a time directories were of limited importance: they generated little human traffic for starters. And the PageRank of individual pages often seemed so low that the arduous and often expensive submissions process could seem like too much effort and expense.

Not any more.

Google has now, in its infinite wisdom, decided that directories are important. Very important. In fact, having links in multiple directories now needs to be one of the cornerstones of optimising sites for search engines.

If you have a site and you want traffic to come in from Google, you should look to ensure that you start submitting your links to a range of directories.

DMOZ is probably the most important, not least because Google forms its own directory from DMOZ results, not to mention as do hundreds of smaller directories you will probably never learn the names of.

But it seems that ever directory has its value. And, in Google’s eyes, that value has become suddenly elevated.

It’s up to webmaster’s now to take advantage of that value.