Freakz said:
Could you give an example of a directory that does have search-engine-friendly categories?
Take a look at the categories on this page here that I just put up:
http://www.skiptools.com/cat_Reciprocal.php you can see that each of the link categories points to a URL that does not contain a query string, as apposed to the categories listed on the site above.
Lets take an example category from that site, it looks like this:
http://www.siteseek.net/links.php?ax=list&sub=2&cat_id=79
You could easily change the .htaccess file on the site to use mod_rewrite to make the link url look like this:
http://www.siteseek.net/linkslist-2-79.htm, which would be search engine friendly. This could be accomplished by adding the following code to the .htaccess file on the site:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule links(.*)-(.*)-(.*)\.htm$ /links.php?ax=$1⊂=$2&cat_id=$3
Then, by making a few changes to the script on his site, all of the links could be created on the page to reflect
http://www.siteseek.net/linkslist-[sub category id here]-[category id here].htm. Now all of the links are search engine friendly.
For those that are unfamiliar with mod_rewrite, there is a nice tool here:
http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/mod_rewrite-rewriterule-generator.shtml that will help you make all the needed changes.
As to the second part of my comment about the URL being masked in the links, If you add a link to the site above, the url of your link will look something like this:
http://www.siteseek.net/links.php?ax=out&id=988 Since the actual URL of your site is not the link, it never gets seen by a search engine, therefore has no benefit for you. It is obvious the reasons that the script is working that way, it is because they are logging clicks. But there are still ways to get around that and give users the PR value at the same time.
Hope that helped answer your question.
BTW weblaunch, not trying to hijack your thread here, just trying to show how you can make your site more appealing for people to add links to it by making a few minor changes.
