Dirsensei Web Directory Blog contacted Rand Fishkin a couple of weeks ago about some remaining issues that are happening or ongoing. Their group went to San Marcos and Rand needed a vacation. After that much needed rest and a quality time spent, he immediately replied and sent this to us in a very timely manner. He also made an unbiased review of Dirsensei Web Directory and gave me some hints about editorial integrity that I surely would keep in mind. Thank You Rand and SEOMOZ for that time and I certainly appreciate it.
Dirsensei Web Directory Blog: Thanks for accepting an interview from Dirsensei Web Directory Blog. We hope we could clarify some issues clearly between you and the directory industry but first of all let me ask about your recent trip, Was it for business or about that much needed holiday?
Rand Fishkin: I took off with my fiancèe for Vegas, met up with my grandparents and drove out to Arizona and Utah to see and hike some canyons - it was a terrific time, and a well needed vacation. Next week I’m off to Montrèal to keynote a conference.
Dirsensei Web Directory Blog: To clarify some top issues, when you gave Aviva Directory as an example at your Whiteboard Friday, Why did Aviva came to mind and not some other web directory and what are the search terms that Aviva should rank ?
Rand Fishkin: Aviva’s done a great job of branding themselves and they’ve sent SEOmoz some traffic recently, so I had seen them in our referrals. In terms of specific phrases that Aviva really should be ranking for, I had ID’d a bunch, but here’s a few of them - Go to Avivadirectory, choose something like http://www.avivadirectory.com/Recreation/Motorcycles/ - it’s linked to on the home page. Do some searches:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q…irectory+aviva
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q…ory+racewayatv
Here’s a page that got tons of links - http://www.avivadirectory.com/blogger-law/
Now look at its rankings:
http://www.google.com/search?q=aviva…+needs+to+know
Here’s another one:
http://www.google.com/search?q=aviva+information
and another
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q…ory+blog+aviva
and another
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q…ectories+aviva
(targeting this page - http://www.avivadirectory.com/strongest-directories/)
Dirsensei Web Directory Blog: Do you still believe that in spite of the fact that Aviva Web Directory, who has close to a million links and have an authority status, does the search engines has less trust on it ?
Rand Fishkin: Since Aviva was grouped in with many of the 60+ directories who lost rankings, traffic and pages in Google last week, I’d say that absolutely, the search engines have a trust issue with those domains and Aviva specifically.
Dirsensei Web Directory Blog: As an SEO professional who has attended a lot of SEO conferences do you think Aviva should reconsider on doing some more work for its optimization ?
Rand Fishkin: I’m not sure that it’s optimization that’s a problem for them. From what I can see, Jeff has done a great job building a very good site. The problem is how Google, specifically, perceives directories that sell links - and also how they perceive some of the link building tactics Aviva has used to get PR into its own site. I’m not speaking of the social media work, which is terrific, but of some of the other avenues they’ve used for link acquisition.
Dirsensei Web Directory Blog: We go now on another topic which is web directories that floats around and more popping out daily. You know very well that there are some quality directories out there that are worthy for end users or submitters, In your opinion how would you determine a site if its quality or not. Would content be an issue? Do you still think the methodology you choose to judge a quality of a directory is correct? There are lots of directories which are blazing in SERPs for every imaginable keyword and have little content. Are they quality directories? This question is also asked by our dear friend John Rang of Best Internet Resource.
Rand Fishkin: I’d tell John that a directory can be incredibly valuable as a link and as a website. Look at sites like Librarian’s Internet Index, the Salt Lake County Library Resource Links Directory, or the resources directory on Education World . These have a very different feel to them than many of the SEO-targeted, junk directories that you see marketed on Digitalpoint or in other SEO arenas. The quality of the sites they link to, the process for application, the staff who’s considering them, the content on the rest of the site - all of these factor contribute to how they’ll be perceived by the engines.
Dirsensei Web Directory Blog: What’s your opinion about bidding directories and how does Google in your own opinion view this since it is a relatively new phenomenon in the directory market. By checking some listings in a bid directory yourself, does it have useful content or are these primarily aimed at paid links only as any gambling site or a non content site can be included as long as they have the necessary amount to place a bid. Do you think that Google is aware of this?
Rand Fishkin: I actually don’t have much experience with bidding directories, so I’m probably not a good resource to ask about this topic. However, I would say that if you’re considering a purchase on one of them, ask yourself if Matt Cutts, were he to personally visit the site, want to count links from it in the ranking algorithm. If you can solidly answer yes, go for it. If you’ve got reservations, it might not be the best investment.
Dirsensei Web Directory Blog: Matt Cutts says - backlinks from .edu & .gov are treated like any other links from a trusted site by Google. But it seems you and Bob Mutch consider them as having special values . Can you please explain why is it so? Also, Matt and his Google SE team has taken the feed-back on Paid links seriously and there is a major over-haul of Algorithm looming. I guess they will discount the flow of links juice on paid links and they would no longer affect SERPs. As most SEOs rely on those type of links - do you think this would affect the majority of the SEO community? Question by John Rang.
Rand Fishkin: I would say that almost without exception, links from .edu and .gov sites provide more value than most other links. The problem is that folks assume it’s “because” they’re on .edu and .gov domains - that’s not why Bob and myself recommend them. Rather, it’s because nearly every .edu and .gov domain is well-trusted, well-ranked and provides good link value. The same can’t be said of any other commercially available domain extensions.
Dirsensei Web Directory Blog: Why is SEOMOZ’s quality directory list private? If it is public-then other directory owners could look up to them and try to improve their own directories. This would in turn help everyone in a broader perspective. Also, are there any improvements for SEOMOZ Page Strength Tool now or in the future ?
Rand Fishkin: The link directory is one of the services that we felt added a lot of value to premium content. I agree that if it were out in the open, it might have more of a community benefit - we’ll certainly consider that going forward. As for Page Strength - we made a recent upgrade about 35 days ago, and reports coming through now have an average accuracy of above 80% - while that’s not great, and we’re always trying to get better, it’s a good step up from the 60% accuracies we were seeing back in June & July. We’ve recently made an investment in more hardware and data-capture abilities, and we’ll probably have another large upgrade sometime in October or November that I hope will bring us close to 95% accuracy.
Dirsensei Web Directory Blog: There are sites I will pick randomly from Aviva’s Strongest Directory List. Would you take the time to review each one and give yuor view on them ? In just a few words or a sentence. Sorry for the long list but I asked for 25 originally and limited it to 20.
Rand Fishkin: Sadly, I don’t have the time to go through these, but I will check out DirSensei.
My first take is that the design is spiffy - I’m a fan of the samurai theme 
Checking out the new links page, the sites that have been added recently certainly look to be of very high quality, with the possible exception of something like the Peak Level Directory (which looks at first glance like it might be a bit fishy, but I didn’t dig deep, so that’s just a gut feeling).
I checked out a few of the categories linked-to on the home page like relationships - I found this site - active relationships - linked to from that page, and that got me a little concerned, because it looks like pure spam. One of the big ways that engines devalue and penalize directories is by looking at who they link to, and if this site is an indication of other bad stuff that might be in the directory, I’d be a bit worried.
The last thing I’ll check is some rankings - searches like this, this and this make me think that Google is giving a healthy amount of respect to the directory. I don’t think there’s any penalty on it as of right now.