Article Directories: What Makes A Good One?

How do you know which article directories to submit your website to? Believe me, it’s not easy. I’d be real careful about submitting to every directory out there. Some are better than others. But there is one criteria that is often cited about article directories that I would caution you against in using as a selection criteria. That criteria is PageRank. Don’t use it.

PageRank can be deceiving. Just because a web domain has a high PageRank doesn’t mean it’s a good article directory. Maybe it has a high PageRank because it was another type of website for 10 years and just recently converted into an article directory. If that’s the case then it needs to prove itself as an article directory.

A better thing to look at is traffic. How much traffic does that article directory get? You can find out by going to Alexa.com and checking the traffic stats. This isn’t a perfect tool, but Alexa can give you an idea about traffic. Look at the upward and downward trend over the last 3 months. Then look at the raw traffic numbers. If the traffic is low and the downward trend is going down then it’s not a good site. If the traffic number is high and the trend is upward then that’s a good sign.

Another thing you can do is go to Google and type in site:http://www.nameofarticledirectory.com. Google will tell you how many pages of that article directory have been indexed. If the number is low then the directory probably has website crawl issues. If the number is high then it’s a good directory.

Also take a look at the cache option in your Google toolbar (you do have the Google toolbar, don’t you?). How long ago was the site cached? If it’s been too long then it isn’t getting updated very often.

Keep in mind that Google no longer passes link juice from article directories. That’s not to say that it couldn’t. Google often overlooks its own policies. But don’t count on links from article directories. You are submitting articles for traffic. It’s nice if that traffic comes from the article directory, but it doesn’t to. You want other publishers to use your articles. The traffic and links from those publisher websites are what you really want the article directory to do for you. If you find your articles getting published then you’ve found a good article directory.