Sometimes confused, web directories and articles directories are totally different tools websites owners and masters have used along the years in order to increase their business’ visibility and to build a higher rank with search engines for their sites. What these two have in common is the entrance upon submission and the division into different hierarchical categories of their content.
Web directories are internet pages made up of collections of links towards different types of websites. Till not so long ago they constituted the data basis for the main search engine, but their popularity has drastically declined ever since. However, they continue to exist in more specialized forms, organized around a certain business segment or focusing on a specific geographical area and they are still used by other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing.
Articles directories are collections of documents on all sorts of topics, with links towards the interested website. The authors have to respect certain rules when writing their articles such as key words density, content quality and relevance. The techniques articles directories use in order to be indexed by search engines are very different form those of web directories. They rely on key words and meta tags in order to crawl to search engines.
Therefore, although both of them have been used along the years for the same purposes, web directories and articles directories position themselves as distinct tools internet marketers can make skillful use of. However, a thorough knowledge of the way they function and updated information on this topic is always needed in order to make them work for your website’s and business’ benefit as search engines constantly change their algorithm towards more and more complex and sophisticated ones. This has been the case with Google when they introduced the Panda self-learning algorithm that revolutionized the search engine optimization industry.