It has come to our attention that some directory owners have their directories set to auto approve links. Let’s talk about why this is not a good idea, and then some other strategies you might consider along these lines that may not be as problematic.

The problems that arise from auto approve directories:

1. Many links will be placed in the wrong category
2. Link building services that specialize in selling links will use your directory as one of the links they sell, and Google does not take kindly to paid links, especially those that did not involve an editorial review.
3. Some links may point to malware, gambling sites, or adult sites without your knowledge.
4. Even if you do include some quality links in the directory, there will be an abundance of low quality links
5. The Google Unnatural Link Penalty tends to be most likely used with Autp Approve directories, but rarely if ever with Human Edited Directories.
6. The links will be more likely to have spammed anchor text since there is no editorial review before inclusion.

So the internet a favor, and never open your site to links being added that are not vetted in some way. Now there are some great strategies for doing this:

1. Make good use of your spam words banning in your admin panel under System > Ban Control
2. If you want something more cutting edge, try only allowing links with a pagerank of say 3 or higher. In Admin under Link Types, click on the pencil next to the link type and on the next screen enter a value for Minumum PageRank
3. Use tools like the Unnatural Links Checker to get the bad stuff out of the database.
   
   You should be doing these sorts of things anyway to help maintain quality, but we urge you to reconsider any sort of auto approve directory. You just become a mark for unscrupulous SEO practitioners using link submitter tools, and we always hope you will use phpLD to help improve the quality of the internet!