The owner of Aviva Directory recently posted an interesting list of directories classified according to their Page Strength as calculated with SEOmoz’s page strength tool. I have to admit that the tool is pretty cool and the results interesting. However, the real question is: Is this list useful? or as a more general question Is the page strength as an index useful?
I will try to answer that using an example from my main field of expertise. Personally, I am a health professional and in my field we use a lot of indices to classify people in categories. Let’s take for example the Body Mass Index (BMI) that a lot of people and health professionals use to assess the health risk of people as well as their weight status. There are a lot of people that use it without second thought and believe it’s a very useful tool and there are a lot of people that claim it’s useless because of it’s limitations. So is an index like that really useful? The simple answer is yes. It is useful as long as you understand it’s limitations simply because by understanding it’s limitations you can interpret correctly the results. Realise when you need to take them seriously and when to just disregard them and try a different method of assessment.
So what are the limitations of the Page Strength Tool especially in regards to directories?
Let’s take a look at all of the parameters that the tool takes into account.
Links pointing to full URL and Links pointing to domain:. Of course this is an important factor that I look at as well. However the results can easily be skewed if someone has a few sitewide backlinks from big sites like forums or even other directories. It is always wise to check the quality of at least the first 20-50 backlinks of a site (at least that’s what I do). I realise that this is almost impossible because how can you assess the quality of backlinks using a query or if you found a way the processing power needed to get the results would be too high.
Position at Google for first four words of title tag on target URL: Again a useful metric that I guess is meant to show if the site (or directory in this case) is “sandboxed” or carries a penalty. Possible problems that I see with this is that a site may not appear anywhere in the top10 if it uses a generic title. For example my directory is called Your Index, I realise that it’s not a competitive term per se but it is a term that appears in a lot of high profile websites that might outrank me and as a result I will not appear in the top results. The fact is that I appear in the results for the first results of my title which are “Your Index Directory :: Web” however for some reason the tool skips the first word and searches for “Index Directory Web Directory” (I have to check to see if there is a problem with my title or if it was just a glitch of the tool)
Age of Domain: No objections here. The only thing that I can see as a potential problem is that subdomains of older websites might get a bit of a boost.
Links from .Edu and .Gov domains: Again no real complaints here, but again it is a good idea to check the actual .edu and .gov backlinks (SEOmozz allows you to do that easily by clicking on the source)
Alexa Rank: We all know the limitations of Alexa rank and everyone (or almost everyone) knows that the results are really skewed when it comes to webmaster related websites. Also this metric gives a boost to subdomains, since Alexa rank just gives a metric for the whole domain.
Domain Name Visibility: I don’t really understand the usefulness of this metric but I may be missing something.
Internal link percent: Useless in this case because we are looking at homepages, not specific pages.
Del.icio.us Bookmarks: Not a bad idea of implementing that as one of the parameters. The obvious problems with directories is that it might benefit more directory portals where users might have bookmarked other parts of the site.
DMOZ: Nothing much to say here, I just don’t understand why they decided to use Yahoo’s results and not query DMOZ directly.
Wikipedia: Wikipedia links are really hard to get, (I am talking about directories) although I know of a directory that has done really well in this department. However, yes if you badly want to get them then yes there is an easy way to skew the results and the best part is that no one will accuse you of spamming 
(No I am not talking about profiles, although someone might use that too)
Pagerank: The main problem that I see is that the last couple of updates have been a bit messed up (not updating PR for older sites) so the results might be a bit skewed until the next normal PR update.
So yes it has it’s limitations and another limitation when looking at directories is that it doesn’t take into account the number of indexed pages which is really important for directories. However it is still a useful tool and the list compiled by Aviva Directory is a useful guide as long as everyone realises that there are limitations and what are those limitations.
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August 13th, 2006 at 8:31 am
Thanks for such a thoughtful write up!
I do agree with most of what you said. It’s a very useful tool, but obviously as with any tool, there are limitations.
Still, it has an element of objectivity in it that most directory lists don’t have. And it has helped me identify some directories that I didn’t know about previously which are quite strong as well as other very popular directories that turn out not to be so strong.