How to save your site from the death of the directory

For ages and ages google advised that you should submit your site to DMOZ, yahoo and industry related directories. This guidance has gone from the google webmaster pages. So all of you that spent hours and hours seeking out directories as part of your link building strategy were wasting your time.

Google says:

Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site.

Google has been warning of this for a while now and in a recent blog post made it quite clear that relevant content was far more important. And you can’t cheat because Google also says:

Keep in mind that our algorithms can distinguish natural links from unnatural links.

If you relied heavily on inbound links from directories or used exchange links you may well see yourself drop down the index in favour of those site that offer informative and interesting content that is relevant to the search terms.

So what can you do?

Number 1 priority is to review your content. Make sure your site meets the google guidelines. Review you page titles (vital), headers and main content. Check your internal linking and anchor text. Make sure all your images have ‘alt’ text. Clear out any reciprocal and exchange links and hope that the damage is not too severe.