High domain authority for shady link directories

[VanDongenOnline]

Hi there,

First of, I'm new to the moz community and I love it already! So much to learn and to do for getting better and better at SEO. Really helpful!

Okay, my question. If I analyze (top 5) sites with the open site explorer some of them have a link profile consisting just of link directories. How come they rank so high with just link directories backing them up?

The directories often are just ongoing lists of links without any form of content. But the authorities of the directories (page and domain) are often between 40-60 or even above! How come they get such high authority? And do I have to use them for my linking profile or will it hurt me?

On moz I learned not to use those directories because it's quality > quantity these days. But it almost seems as if this is not true because only half of the top positions in my keyword-market actually make use of more then just link directories.

I must say that I operate in the Dutch markets so maybe different rules apply in the Netherlands?

Thanks in advance and kind regards,

Luuk van Dongen

[MattAntonino]

One thing to remember is that Moz only catalogs a VERY small portion of links pointing to a site (compare to Ahrefs or Majestic and THEY only catalog a small portion of the internet.)

So you may be looking at 5-10% of a site's actual profile. It's hard to say what else they have, what is really ranking a site, etc.

http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/experiments/backlink-checker-tools/

[Chris.Menke]

In addition to what Matt said, some directories are very good resources for links and some niches have more than a few well curated directories that are worthwhile.  Don't dispel all directories straight off.

[VanDongenOnline]

So actually you're saying that possibly only the really good link directories are indexed my moz and the more content-rich links are not shown in the open site explorer? If so, do you have any idea how to retrieve those other links?

[Chris.Menke]

That may be so.  The way you say  "content rich links"  comes out sounding like "spammy back links" and Moz does try to keep its crawl focused on higher quality links.  Again, as Matt said, Ahrefs and Majestic are good additional sources for back link research.

[VanDongenOnline]

No by content rich links I mean links from good informative sites/blogs instead of sites with no content or little articles about a strange variety of topics that don't relate to each other.

I will try using majestic SEO and Ahrefs. Thanks for the help!

[KarlBantleman]

You also have to consider whether the company has disavowed these directories. If the website has had SEO done on it for many years then there is a good chance that directories formed a major part of their strategy, however, with the disavow tool in play now, those directories may well have been disavowed recently and they will still show up on their linking profile in OSE. Just a thought for you to consider.

It is true that some local and niche directories are still beneficial even in today's SEO market so don't discount a directory straight away without looking into it further.

[Dr-Pete]

It's important to keep in mind that DA and PA are measures of the strength of a link profile and, to some degree, a site's/page's raw ranking ability. Our authority metrics don't have built in spam-detection, though, and they aren't always aware of sites that Google may have devalued. Spam analysis has been in the works for quite a while now, and it's a complicated problem (as Google has proven). We're hoping to improve DA/PA in this regard over time, but for now there are going to be some situations where a site doesn't really have the ranking power that it's DA suggests. If your gut feeling is that the bulk of the site's links come from bad directories and low-quality sources, you may very well be correct.

[vmialik]

Great to know! Thanks Dr. Pete