On Friday, Google's John Mueller and Gary Illyes both made stern comments about directory links. Gary's was the most telling, where he wrote on Twitter "directories are very often not the right way to build links." John Mueller's tweet was more cryptic using the "Directories? o_O" message.
Here they are:
Directories are very often not the right way to build links. Make sure you know what you're doing & remember that there's manual actions too
— Gary Illyes (@methode) September 30, 2016
Directories? o_O #timewarp
— John Mueller (@JohnMu) September 30, 2016
Gary later said on Twitter that he was talking about an article they both read on Search Engine Land. I suspect it was related to this story which talks about getting links from "highly ranking and well-maintained directories that are relevant to the product or service you provide."
So it seems to me that Google is really not into the idea of getting links from directories. With the closure of the Yahoo Directory and dmoz really dying, do people still use directories? I don't.
So are all directory links bad now? Is that what we should take from these tweets from Gary and John? Possibly.
This post was scheduled to go live today but was written earlier - I am currently offline today.
