In a previous blog post entitled “Latest Google Algorithm Update - Now People Panic!”, as well as in the latest MoreVisibility YouTube Video, I discussed the Google algorithmic changes named “Panda” and how to address certain aspects of your site to ensure that a site-wide penalty isn’t incurred due to low quality content.

Here are some tips on what to avoid so that your link building efforts remain in line with Google Panda:

• Avoid link submissions to directories that have hundreds (or even thousands) of irrelevant links included in its categories.
• Avoid submitting a link to a site that has an inordinate amount of ads on a page with little to no quality content.
• Don’t necessarily rely on a submission site’s PageRank. A site’s PageRank is not always accurate in the first place, plus, its importance has been greatly reduced as of late, as it’s generally not an accurate gauge of a website’s authority.
• Is the category/page you wish to submit your link to even in the search engine indexes? This sounds obvious, but if Google hasn’t crawled and indexed a page in a directory, it’s not going to attribute that inbound link to your site and your efforts will be in vain. Additionally, if a page in a directory is not indexed, this could be indicative that Google has either penalized that directory or the site has poor programming, inhibiting crawler access.

Remember, the Panda Update penalties will impact your whole site and the effects can be drastic, so ensure that your link cultivation efforts aren’t thwarted because of submission to one or two low quality directories. Major websites have been penalized for their link building practices due to Panda, including JCPenney, so no one is immune.

Should we still submit to directories for SEO, or for any reason such as link building and website traffic? The short answer is: yes, but with many caveats. First, it is absolutely imperative that any new site, or any site that has not done so already, submit to the top directories. These are, but are not limited to:

• Yahoo! Directory 
• DMOZ
• Best of the Web

What are directories? Put simply, they are websites that include links to other websites that are listed by topic. Directories used to be considered more important for passing “link value” to a site; the onslaught of less “SEO friendly” directories soured search engines, such as Google, from assigning too much weight to a backlink from those kinds of sites. However, the three directories listed above are the originals, are still some of the most important and can be useful in terms of attaining some quality traffic to your site. In actuality, it is not even known if Google even consider the “premier” directories, like Yahoo! and DMOZ for link value, so it’s best to just submit to them and forget about it and be diligent with other link building strategies, as well.

There are also a plethora of other directories out there, but the majority of them are of extremely low quality as they are very spammy. Essentially, do your due diligence and ensure that any directory you submit your website to is SEO friendly and well respected. The dubious directories can be very easy to spot as they usually look unorganized, have thousands of random links and advertisements on their homepage and tend to have a very low PageRank or no PageRank whatsoever.

Too many outbound links on a website can deplete a site’s own PageRank (the importance Google assigns to a page based on an automatic calculation that factors in the link structure of the web and many other variables). However, this may be more of a relative than an absolute statement; there are ways to externally link to relevant websites without reducing the importance of your own website.

In its simplest form, PageRank can be explained with this formula:

PR(A)= PR(B) + PR(C) + PR(D)

From the formula above, the sum of the PageRank of pages B, C and D is awarded to page A because all of their links are pointing to A. Basically, pages B, C and D are passing on some of their own “link juice” to Page A.

PageRank is assigned on a page by page basis in that the more outbound links one has on a particular page, the PageRank of the page itself is affected. An intelligent strategy is to create a page on the site that includes a collection of links to websites that your users will find helpful. This is a good idea as externally linking from an internal page on your site as opposed to the homepage will not have that much of an affect on the site as a whole. The homepage typically has the highest PageRank by virtue of the links pointing to it. That PageRank from the homepage flows to the internal pages on the site. So, to keep that healthy internal link structure intact, we’d essentially want to have outbound links coming from a lower level page.

However, all of this can be completely avoided with the nofollow attribute. A few years ago, Google put into action the nofollow attribute so webmasters could link to other websites without losing their own “link juice”. This is useful if a webmaster wants to provide links to other quality websites for their users and not lose their own PageRank status.