[ms_khw]

Just curious. There are so many free directories that offer to list your site. Nothing is free, so what do they get out of it? I know some use advertisements on their site and I'm sure make some money. But I've seen others that offer free listings without bombarding you with all of the advertisements. Any thoughts on this?

[tomdkat]

One thing I can think of is adding "relevance" to their site if they have a lot of external sites pointing to theirs. So, if you list your site on their directory they ask for a reciprocal link on your site. Then, when the search engines crawl your site and see the link to their directory, their directory increases in "relevance" since there are a number of external sites (external to the directory site) linking in to the directory site.

Relevance helps increase placement in search results so the more relevant the site to the search terms, the greater the chance that site will appear before other simiar sites in search results.

Peace...