A Primer on Human-edited Website Directories
Thursday, October 15th, 2009Almost everyone is confident with using search engines these days, as they allow us to discover websites rather rapidly. This is wonderful, however search engine results aren’t moderated by humans, but by an algorithm. Why is that noteworthy? Imagine you’re looking for a restaurant in Northampton as an example. One would enter this keyphrase into a search engine, then a number of results would appear. How can one know whether these results are reliable if they’ve never been filtered by a human editor? Here’s how: search engines utilize human-edited online directories as a basic filter.
Directories still play a fundamental part on the internet, and the top-grade directories are necessarily edited by humans. A human may recognize that (for instance) : “hmm, that hotel has been awarded a particular rating for cleanliness and having certain standards, that’s a rather good signal”. A well-known online directory receives many submissions daily. An official will look into these entries, and if the editor is happy that the level of the submission is good enough, it is included in to the online directory. And this is the reason why Google still loves website directories. Both dmoz.org and the Yahoo! directory are interrogated by search engines as filters to discover the trustworthiness of a website – whether it’s listed in these directories or not, since they are edited by humans and have stringent rules-for-entry.
Therefore do not minimize the implication of website directories because almost everyone uses search engines to find websites. A human-edited directory can be an important yardstick as to how authentic a website is. If you are a website owner, also look to get your site included in a niche directory, like a gardening directory, a hotel directory, or a pub directory.