Today I was adding some sites to the directory. I clicked on one, ScifiSource, “your source for science fiction on the web.” The site is 90s-tastic, but whatever, a lot of sites still are nowadays. I clicked on “Featured Site” to get an idea of what kind of sites get added to the directory. The current featured site is “Carmen Argenziono Official Site,” the “official site of Carmen Argenziono of Stargate SG-1.” Okay, fine and dandy. I hover over the link to click on it (“Carmen Argenziono Official Site,” right there in green), only to find that…it’s not a link. Whuh?
Where’s the link, yo?
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Seriously?
Every site in the ScifiSource’s directory has a title and a nice little blurb about the site. However, the actual link to a site is nothing more than a sparkly rocket ship .gif. No alt tag. Just a little rocket ship. An image of a rocket ship.
Clueless folks will just as soon submit their site, see it displayed, and think, “All right, I’m building links to my site! Links are important!”, not realizing that an image link with no alt tag is useless to search engines (not to mention confusing for users–I mean, who the hell would have known that the rocket ship is the thing you click on to get to the site?). I suppose you could argue that the link is still good for traffic (if users actually find the damn thing), but for link building purposes (and for usability’s sake), it’s useless.
A word of advice to any of you looking to build links via directory submission: make sure the link is actually valuable (text link or an image link with appropriate alt text, relevant anchor text, not redirected, not nofollowed, all that good stuff). Rocket links aren’t valuable.
*Postscript*: Rand does point out that search engines should be able to pull relevant text around the link and use that as the anchor text, thus redeeming value to the link, but I still think it’s pretty bad form (and poor SEO) to have rocket links. Rocket links bad, I say! Bad!
UPDATE FROM RAND: I added this in the comments, but it seems worth repeating up here:
Honestly, I think they’re probably serving up great link quality because they only take sites that are highly relevant, they’ve got quality standards and they’re certainly not doing it for the benefit of the search engines (which is exactly why search engines would want to count them!).
It may seem ironic, even counter-intuitive, but sometimes the best links are from the unlikliest of sources 🙂
