Link popularity is one of the most important factors within the search engines’ ranking algorithms nowdays. Since it isn’t possible to get the top positions for very competitve phrases with no incoming links, webmasters and SEOs started finding ways how to obtain such positions shortly. They found a great idea immediatelly; A directory is very useful for this purpose. Why to wait for the natural links, if it’s possible to submit any website into hundreds of various directories?

Basically, any directory link should be considered as natural too. It’s because the directory owner should visit each website before approval. Yes, this model could work. However, there are many caddish webmasters, many webmasters who simply don’t speak English well, and of course, there are many webmasters who want money for a successfull approval. Because of this reason, directories can’t be considered as trusted at all. On the other hand, they can’t be neglected, since there are many quality and human edited directories. For example, my directory is based on very exact rules and I’m accepting sites which fit these rules only. You wouldn’t believe how many SEOs submit their websites without checking the submission rules. That’s why 90% of submissions are rejected and source IPs are banned. But let’s get back to the link popularity problem.

As I wrote above, there are tons of free directories nowdays, but only a few of them accept deep links without any charge. This is the major problem of such directories. Any directory should offer free deep link listing, since deep links are demonstration of quality. Let’s explain it. Usually, homepages aren’t very informative and their role is just „a gate to the internal pages.“ Of course, quality homepages should be listed within directories too. On the other hand, why an informative and quality article/internal page shouldn’t be listed there too? This is the way how Google rates the directories. If there are deep links, it simply gets better ranking.

Generally, deep links are ranked much better than links to homepages. It’s the same like many links from pages with PageRank value of 0; 100 links from various locations mean much more than 1 link from page with high PageRank value even if those 100 links are of PageRank 0.

A deep link is useful for another reason too. If you have an article on your website and someone links to this article, such link will improve it’s ranking. So the basic idea shouldn’t be many incoming links to the homepage, but many links pointing to the internal pages on your website. Achieving this goal isn’t as easy as achieving many incoming links to the homepage. Moreover, this kind of goal is achievable via pure natural links only. You won’t find enough directories which accept deep links at free of cost. Unlike aimed SEO link building campaign, forums are still good resource of quality links. If you run a quality website, you will get enough links from various related forums and people will automatically link to your homepage too. You only need them to discover your site.

Besides forums, there are other ways how to get free deep links:

• 1) Reciprocal links. I recommend you to reciprocate with friends only. It’s because other webmasters may delete the links/content how time goes by. Friends will at least notify you about such steps.
• 2) Write various articles and list your internal webpages within the list of references.
• 3) Publish the links on the rest of your sites.

In my opinion, purchasing deep links from various directories isn’t worth it. However, this is my personal feeling only. I have found a lot of directories which simply deleted their content (links) no matter they were paid or not. This is very frustrating and even though there are many good directories, you never know which one expires, switches to paid one or so.