Best Web Directories
Directory Ranking Criteria

Traffic used to be a more important criteria but with the number of directories today, traffic has lost much of its importance. In reality, few people use directories to find information they want. So if you submit to one free directory, you should do it more for the PageRank link than for potential traffic. Traffic may become more important if the Search Engines start using traffic information as part of their ranking criteria.

The Alexa rating is an obvious choice to use to judge traffic but I don't rely on Alexa alone as the nature of the system is open to manipulation. I also base the traffic ranking on the reputation of the directory and the way it is promoted. Some directories are natural offshoots of related businesses that point search traffic to the directory. I would mostly be looking for traffic coming from the target audience of the directory (the general public for general directories, webmasters for webmasters directories). Advertising can also help a directory attain traffic.

A directory that is seen as an authority may be used to feed other directories and search engines. In this case, a listing in one directory could increase your traffic and backlinks many times over (see DMOZ review). Corporate arrangements can also see a site's data being used elsewhere.

Traffic will also depend on how appealing the directory is to the end user. Things like search speed, usefulness and ease of use all affect long-term traffic.

A good industry specific directory can be an exception as these sites can bring good, qualified traffic to your site.

Unique content is a plus for any website.  Without unique content the SEs have little motivation to visit and index the site.   Since many directories tend to have many of the same sites listed, with the same titles and descriptions unique content can be a challenge.  

A good directory will create a unique category structure that would help define the directory. A bad directory will find a free category dump, even if it used by hundreds of other directories. Uniqueness in the tiltes and descriptions of the listings are a definite plus.

Apart from the directory, any additional pages of unique content on the website can only help. 

Ranking for Link Approval Time is subjective. A six week wait for a well established PR5 directory is fine but not impressive for a brand new directory with few listings.

On the other hand, a directory that does not ad new free listings does not even make it to the "best of" list. There are many directories that no longer actively add listings. These directories may not have the resources to review the large number of submissions. They may have plenty of listings already and adding newer sites will not help the quality of their directory or make any difference in their current advertising revenue. The problem is that they don't inform site submitters.

Other directories offer free submission, but rarely approve freebies. Their real goal is to get paid submissions and may use the free submissions to try to "up sell" submitters into a paid submission.

There are so many directories that not all of them will be around a year or two down the road. Others will be unprofitable, causing owners to lose interest. It is obvious that some owners have put little effort into their site. The directories that are appealing, fast, useful to users, and easy to use have a better chance of making it. It helps if the people running a directory have good knowledge of classification. The real payback comes years later when the little-known directory is popular and your listing is on page 1 of a high PR page. On the other hand,

Since there are so many directories, a directory with a a unique selling point would also provide a positive overall impression.

Negative Ranking Factors

There are so many good directories out there that having one of these negative factors is enough to disqualify a site for consideration.

Scripted Listings
Some sites try to preserve their pagerank by not sharing it with the sites they list. Scripted links (e.g. PHP, CGI) are used by some directories to link to your site rather than the normal link that looks like abc.com/. Most spider-based search engines may give credit for the link to the directory rather than to your site. PR does not get passed to your site in this situation. Avoid these directories unless they can provide you with good traffic.

Links do not pass PageRank
The directory should should not be have the "Nofollow" attribute on it's outgoing links. The links should not use JavaScript redirection techniques (or similar typs of rediction) and the pages should not be excluded by robots.txt.

Robots.txt
The robots.txt file can be used to block major search engines from accessing certain folders or files on the site. A directory with too many zero pagerank files could be using this tactic. You should be able to can view a robots.txt file by entering www.best-web-directories.com/robots.txt

Duplicate Content
A fairly recent phenomenon has seen entrepreneurial people create a directory, add categories and often, some links. They then make a copy of the data and sell it, and then they sell it again and again. Other directory owners may use the exact same categories in multiple sites.
These sites will be pretty useless as the Search Engines will identify the duplication and ignore all but one of them. Google has also spent much effort on penalizing scraper sites that don't have any unique content.

Dynamically Created Pages
Some dynamically created pages are not easily indexed by the search engine spiders, although this occurrence is rare today. If the page your site is on does not get indexed then you will not receive a link by that search engine. The link:www.directoryname.com command will tell you how many pages the directory has indexed.

Note: also be careful of these tactics with any reciprocal linking partner.