Once upon a time, you could improve your search engine visibility by signing up for dozens (hundreds, thousands…) of different directories (of vastly differing quality), earning a link to your website in the process. At the time, each of these links effectively served as an “up-vote” of sorts to the search engines, making your website appear more authoritative with each entry.
Of course, we all know what happened next: SEOs and marketers at every level abused the system, Google’s Penguin and Panda algorithm updates came along, and these kinds of links were devalued to the point that they were somewhere between useless and dangerous…
