Imagine that you happen to run a search engine, and no matter how good your bots are performing, you just can't deny the need for the human touch. There are many ways for Google to find human active and pull data from it to rank the sites according the appreciation they get from humans. Complex algorithms don not create the rankings, they just reflect the value the sites received from human beings. Directory reviewers are without any doubt part of it.

What I've noticed the last few months; google has managed to really ?understand? what the directory owners 1 by 1 are up to. And those that used ?smart? tricks got their asses kicked. While most of the quality directories haven't changed much. But, most of the fake-directories, networks, link-farms, mailing traps, and a whole bunch more sites that have no other intention, but to parasite on the internet, lost all there pages from the google index. Google is of course totally free to do so.

Directories have always been a source for Google to find web sites and get a basic value tag for them, as long the human reviewer does his job well. Many directories are very well maintained, many directories have whole teams of people who actually rewrite each description to make sure the directory has 100% unique content.

Of course, we all know that there are thousands of directories online. Much more then what makes any sense. Most of them exist purely for the whole link building industry. Obviously Google is fully aware of it. Still, even after removing thousands of directories out of their index; they still accept a couple of thousand more directories to remain in the index. Why. Well, for a bunch of reasons of course. The most important reason; because google needs these directories! Google uses the directories to find new sites themselves and to have a tool to get a first impression of the new sites. For google to determine which directories they can trust is of course crucial. Well, they achieved it!

How hard can it be for Google to know that a site is in fact a directory? And categorizing them and labeling with their value system, that's just work, not much more. For Google to know whether or not the information they can get from those directories is reliable, is just as easy as any of the other steps Google needs to take to have thousands of human directory reviewers working for them also human filter ? for free. Believe me, Google loves directories.

What about those hundreds, even thousands of totally crappy bad directories? Just ignore them! Even if that means you can only use about 20% of the directories, we're still talking about hundreds, even thousands of directories. Ok, niche directories included. In fact, the average value of just a few niche directories is much higher than those thousands of crap general directories all together.

So, what we conclude so far?

Although the vast majority of the directories out there are total crap, the small remaining minority is still, very, very big. At least 1.000 of the free general directories are still totally worth it to submit to. The top 300 are in fact very high value, quality directories of which a link still is simply a must. Is the link value less than before? Well, I honestly don't think so. Why? Google has no interest in devaluing the decent directories, simply because big G needs them.

What Google is up to is very much the same as it did with the whole link exchange issue. Google is just weeding out the crap. Google is not discrediting the concept of a directory as a linking tool. Google has just become much better using the real value of the whole directory landscape. That's all there is too it.