I believe the real issue with directory links is that only some of them are good and worthy, while some others are junk, being able to tell this difference is the key between loosing your time and having a fruitful link building campaign.  How you can tell if a directory is good enough or that you should pass it.  Here are the 3 main criteria of identifying a good directory from a bad one.

1) The director is listed in the Search Engines and most pages are being crawled.

You can find the directory in the most popular search engines, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. Also the category pages of the directory are cached on the search engines, if the directory offers detail pages, these should be indeed too.

2) The links are plain text, no redirects or javascript.

Check the source code of the pages of the directory. Look to see if the links are plain a href’s, without the rel=”nofollow” attribute, and no sneaky redirects are present. By validating all these you guarantee that these links are seeing and counted by Search Engines.

3) Doesn’t link to bad neighborhoods.

The directory doesn’t link to questionable websites, specially topics like gambling, casino adult, and illegal content websites. Be very wary about directory that offers sitewide likes to these type of sites.

Hopefully these guidelines will help you do more quality link building campaigns getting links from quality web directories.

According to a study done by Krishna Bharat and Andrei Brodner there are several reasons why data are replicated or why mirror sites are created – Load Balancing, High Availability, Multi-lingual replication, Franchises or Local versions, Database Sharing, Virtual Hosting, and Maintaining Pseudo Identities.

In load balancing, replication of data is done to decrease the servers’ loads. Instead of just having one server to handle all the traffic from web surfers interested in the data or content, the site is mirrored or the data replicated so that the traffic is split between two or more servers.

Virtual hosting also sometimes result in mirroring. This happens to services with different websites and host names but use the same IP address and server. What happens is the path to one site is the valid one while the path to the other site simply gives an identical webpage as a result.

Google’s Webmaster Guideline about Duplicate Content

Search engines are blatantly against replicated data so much so that Google even has a warning against them in their Webmaster Guidelines. Google’s Webmaster Guidelines were a list of Do’s and Don’ts that ought to be followed by websites to help the search engine in finding, indexing, and ranking websites. Following the Do’s will of course increase the chance that Google will list a specific website and ran it favorably as well. However, doing any of the Don’ts will of course detract from a website’s rank.

Valid Mirrored Sites

However, for valid mirror sites like those mentioned above (multi-lingual, franchise, etc.) there should be no worry since search engines have provisions for such things and take into account the motive behind them. You can help your mirror site by making sure that you follow all the other guidelines to get noticed and ranked by Google. Following the guidelines will surely help not only your ranking with Google but with other search engines as well.

Probably not. Sure, you’ll get listed with the search engines easily. But without a top twenty listing at one of the majors (Google, Yahoo! or MSN), you won’t have traffic, literally, banging down your door.

In order to get better search engine results you need to make sure you are using the right keywords (and know how to use them), have links pointed your way and regularly check the results of your hard work. Here’s how.

Putting Keywords in the Right Places

Once you’ve picked a keyword that applies directly to your blog, make sure to incorporate it into the following portions of one complete blog posting:

# The title;
# The first sentence;
# Each header (if you have any);
# Once a paragraph; and
# The last sentence.

If you have any links to outside sources, use the same keyword as your link text where possible. Also, for each blog posting, try and pick a different (but related) keyword to use. Feel free to reuse keywords every 30-45 postings.

Submitting to Directories

Your third step is to take these keyword optimized blog postings and post them to the article and blog directories. Most of the search engines determine the relevancy of your blog by how many outside websites link directly to you; therefore, posting your blog entries (with a link back to your site in your resource blurb) is an easy and straightforward way of doing so.

Checking Your Progress

It may take a couple of days to see any results, so try and wait a week before you take a look at StatCounter. Have your hits increased at all? Are there any new search engine referrals?

To track your blog’s ascent up the search engine rankings for any given keyword, try Digital Point’s free Keyword Tracker Tool (http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/keywords/). It is an excellent way of ensuring your blog positioning efforts are paying off.

With all blog postings, content is key. Without useful, interesting information that cannot be found elsewhere, your visitors won’t come back for more. Incorporate these simple search engine optimization techniques into your blogging practice however, and you’ll both keep the visitors you already have and dramatically increase your readership through high ranking search engine placement in no time.

Squidoo is a network of user-generated lenses—single pages that highlight one person’s point of view, recommendations, or expertise. Lenses can be about anything, such as ideas, people or places, hobbies and sports, pets or products, philosophy, and politics. Lenses aren’t primarily intended to hold content; more emphasis is placed on recommending and advice then pointing to content on the web.

Squidoo’s content is highly ranked in Google and other search engines as it is treated as one of the authority sites. Squidoo recently changed their nofollow link rules. Once your lens is established, you get dofollow links from there. This gives Squidoo lenses more ranking power in the search engines. That’s why I’m taking advantage of it.

You can even make money from your Squidoo lens, as they share the ad revenue with the users (or lensmasters in their own term). It’s like getting paid to promote you own blog. So why not.

The following is a video demo on Squidoo:

This post credits to my twitter buddy Anthony Bulchalka and his little eBook “10 Web 2.0 Tips”. Download from his web site, you will find some very useful information there.

3-way link exchange – a link exchange agreement when there are no two sites pointing to each other

algorithm – the mathematical formula in a search engine used to rank sites

anchor text – the text that is clickable. Also known as hyperlink

backlinks – incoming links to a website

black hat seo – unethical techniques used to gain high search engine rankings that do not fall within the terms of service of search engines. Some examples are hiding written text (black letters on black background), link farming and cloaking

BLs – backlinks

cache – a storage area within a search engine’s database for copies of web pages

cgi-bin – a storage folder that contains Common Gateway Interface – Binary scripts. There is normally one cgi-bin per website.

cloaking – a black hat system of delivering custom content to an engine spider but hiding the code or content from visitors

dofollow – standard incoming links that do not have the nofollow attribute(see also “nofollow”)

doorway page – a webpage designed to draw in internet traffic and then redirect this traffic to another website. Also known as bridge, entry, gateway, jump and zebra pages [a probable engine penalty]

Firefox – a web browser developed by Mozilla that is free to download and provides an alternative to Microsoft’s Windows Internet Explorer

frames – website design using multiple, independent sections to create a single webpage. Each frame is built as a separate HTML file, but with one “master” file to identify each selection. [unfriendly to engine crawlers]

Google Analytics – a free service offered by Google that generates detailed stats about website visitors. A benefit of using this service is to check the Page Views your site gets, to determine pay-per-click and other paid ads quality. Other benefits include tracking: Keyword popularity specific to a search engine, all other referring websites and visitors’ physical location

HTML – HyperText Markup Language. Designed for the creation of webpages with clickable text and other information to be displayed in a web browser

IBL – in bound (incoming) link

image alt tag – the alternative text that the browser displays when the website visitor does not want to or cannot see an image on a website. Placed in the image tag like this: <img src=”s.gif” alt=”SEO”>

inside pages – the non-home pages of a website, also known as internal pages

IP address – a unique identifier that has four numbers separated by dots, like this: 57.247.271.73. All computers across the internet are assigned one. They are used like street addresses.

Link farm – a group of links on a variety of pages solely for the purpose of increasing link popularity for search engines. Link farms are normally created by programs, rather than by human beings. [an engine penalty]

Matt Cutts – worker at Google, specializing in SEO issues. Known for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cutting down on link spam. The best place to see his literature is at his SEO Blog.

META tags – write-up placed within the HTML <head> </head> tags of a webpage, providing information that is not visible to browsers

nofollow – an HTML attribute used to instruct search engines that a hyperlink should not influence the link target’s engine ranking. Used to cut down on irrelevant content to improve the quality of search engine results

one-way link – a link that has been obtained without a link exchange. A non-reciprocal link

organic SEO – techniques used for unpaid high ranking results on search engines

PR – Google PageRank: a numerical value that represents the popularity of a website. Found on the Google Toolbar

SE – search engine

SEM – search engine marketing

SEO – search engine optimization

SEOs – search engine optimizers

SERP – search engine results page. The page that users see after clicking Search at an engine

URL – Uniform Resource Locator. A world wide web address

web 2.0 – the second generation of internet-based services that let people collaborate and share information online in ways previously unavailable. For example: social networking sites, wikis, communication tools and folksonomies

web hosting service – a company that provides web server space to individuals and organizations, used to store all of a website’s files. That server hosts the website.

white hat seo – techniques for high rank that fall within the terms of service of search engines

XML – Extensible Markup Language

It’s part of a mini site network of 4 sites.

It has got “all in one seo pack 1.4.6.13″ installed.

It has got 3 paid links: 2 on page rank 3 sites and one on a page rank 1 site. (who says google doesn’t like paid links?)

It also has got a few links from blog comments.

That all I can come up with. Any comments?