I read various forums, blogs everyday. With every Google change there are lots of people who are dissatisfied with the results and posting various comments how google must rank the sites.
Let me ask one open question:
Lets say we search for “french modeling agencies”. How do you want to rank sites?
1. Every french modeling site one after another depending on popularity and google algo.
2. Directory with the “french modeling agencies” above the results of modeling agencies sites itself.
Lots of people with choose the answer number 1, they hate directories, they say that they are irrelevant, because searcher needs to go to another site to get to the french modeling agencies.
I would choose the answer number 2, because:
1. Not every agency has the website, but they can register to the directories their address, telephone and the name of the company. Directory results can be more complete.
2. You can’t rate agencies by google algo or internet popularity. If google will list agencies one agency after another depending on their algo, they will get internet agencies above the real and normal agencies in their index, because webmasters will work on that. Directory can rate and list the agencies different way, usually its manual editing and really good agencies can be listed above the bad ones. That makes much better result for the searcher.
So the same we can get in other types of business and I think that google strategy to give better positions to the directories was the right choice.
