No Local Directory links in Open Site Explorer?

[rianDS]

Hi there,

I just signed up for seomoz pro today and have been playing around in OSE looking at a number of local business websites that I manage SEO for. For all of them, I have put an endless amount of effort ensuring they have good quality, accurate business listings in all the local directories like yelp, yellowpages, hotfrog, tripadvisor, etc. For most of them, I did this months or even up to a year ago. However, I don't see a single link reported in OSE that is a result of my efforts here. Does OSE not report links from local business directories, or should I be concerned that I'm somehow not optimizing properly, or are these types of links of such little value that they don't get picked up, something else? Thanks for the help!

[EricaMcGillivray]

Yes, we do pull from local directories. (Though some, like I believe Yelp, do block our crawlers.) However, our crawlers do not crawl the entire web, and our data only comes from the sites that we crawl in order to ensure quality. We do try to crawl all the major sites.

[rianDS]

Thank you for you're response. That is helpful to know. I'm guessing then that garbage link directories do not get crawled (even the big ones). Is this correct? If there are some quality directories that I think should be included but may not be, is there a way to submit them for consideration?

[EricaMcGillivray]

Yes, we try not to crawl garbage directories, no matter how large they are. Check out Dr Pete's post, Where's The Love, DMOZ?, where he talks about how a lot of the large directories that are spammy (or even ones that aren't) aren't index by either OSE or Google, especially as the categories get more finite.

We currently don't have a place to suggest sites. However, you can head here to vote up the suggest feature for a place to submit/suggest sites for indexing.