this is a very important answer for all of us. Look at it!

Summary:
Question : what kind of directories are seen as a source of paid links and if yahoo and botw directories charges money to list your websites and links then why they are not seen as any other sites selling paid links?Answer : This is more like the regular template answer of matt cutts.

What is the value of a directory. Do they charge money to list your site, what is the editorial value of the directory. How do they list sites, do they only add links that are being submitted or they find links on their own?

If the editorial value is low, means all links submitted are approved then directory is selling paid links. fly by night directories, directories asking for submissions on the basis of page rank etc. directories accepting text, (am sure he means keywords here, or anchor text).

He says yahoo directory has good editorial value so its a good directory.

Source

We have used a wide variety of sources from around the Web. A full list of source references is available at the bottom of the post for those interested. We here at Pingdom also did some additional calculations to get even more numbers to show you.

Email

* 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
* 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
* 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
* 100 million – New email users since the year before.
* 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
* 92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
* 24% – Increase in spam since last year.
* 200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).

Websites

* 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
* 47 million – Added websites in 2009.

Web servers

* 13.9% – The growth of Apache websites in 2009.
* -22.1% – The growth of IIS websites in 2009.
* 35.0% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2009.
* 384.4% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2009.
* -72.4% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2009.

Domain names

* 81.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2009.
* 12.3 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2009.
* 7.8 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2009.
* 76.3 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
* 187 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2009).
* 8% – The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet users

* 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
* 18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
* 738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.
* 418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.
* 252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.
* 179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
* 67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.
* 57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.
* 20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media

* 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
* 84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
* 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
* 57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
* 4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
* 350 million – People on Facebook.
* 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
* 500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.

Images

* 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
* 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
* 30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

Videos

* 1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
* 12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
* 924 million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
* 182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
* 82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
* 39.4% – YouTube online video market share (USA).
* 81.9% – Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos.

Web browsers

* 62.7% – Internet Explorer
* 24.6% – Firefox
* 4.6% – Chrome
* 4.5% – Safari
* 2.4% – Opera
* 1.2% – Other

Malicious software

* 148,000 – New zombie computers created per day (used in botnets for sending spam, etc.)
* 2.6 million – Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc.)
* 921,143 – The number of new malicious code signatures added by Symantec in Q4 2009.

About the Author: Website and web server stats from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign and Webhosting.info. Internet user stats from Internet World Stats. Web browser stats from Net Applications. Email stats from Radicati Group. Spam stats from McAfee. Malware stats from Symantec (and here) and McAfee. Online video stats from Comscore, Sysomos and YouTube. Photo stats from Flickr and Facebook. Social media stats from BlogPulse, Pingdom (here and here), Twittercounter, Facebook and GigaOm.

Source: http://www.entireweb.com/

What is 301 redirect?

301 redirect is the best method to preserve your current search engine rankings when redirecting web pages or a web
site. The code “301″ is interpreted as “moved permanently”. After the code, the URL of the missing or renamed page is
noted, followed by a space, then followed by the new location or file name. You implement the 301 redirect by creating a .htaccess file.

What is a .htaccess file?

When a visitor/spider requests a web page, your web server checks for a .htaccess file. The .htaccess file contains specific instructions for certain requests, including security, redirection issues and how to handle certain errors.

How to implement the 301 Redirect

1. To create a .htaccess file, open notepad, name and save the file as .htaccess (there is no extension).

2. If you already have a .htaccess file on your server, download it to your desktop for editing.

3. Place this code in your .htaccess file:
redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

4. If the .htaccess file already has lines of code in it, skip a line, then add the above code.

5. Save the .htaccess file

6. Upload this file to the root folder of your server.

7. Test it by typing in the old address to the page you’ve changed. You should be immediately taken to the new location.

Notes: Don’t add “http://www” to the first part of the statement – place the path from the top level of your site to the page. Also ensure that you leave a single space between these elements:

redirect 301 (the instruction that the page has moved)

/old/old.htm (the original folder path and file name)

http://www.you.com/new.htm (new path and file name)

When the search engines spider your site again they will follow the rule you have created in your .htaccess file. The search engine spider doesn’t actually read the .htaccess file, but recognizes the response from the server as valid.

During the next update, the old file name and path will be dropped and replaced with the new one. Sometimes you may see alternating old/new file names during the transition period, plus some fluctuations in rankings. According to Google it will take 6-8 weeks to see the changes reflected on your pages.

Other ways to implement the 301 redirect:

1. To redirect ALL files on your domain use this in your .htaccess file if you are on a unix web server:
redirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com
redirectMatch permanent ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com

You can also use one of these in your .htaccess file:

redirect 301 /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html
redirect permanent /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html
redirectpermanent /index.html http://www.domain.com/index.html

This will redirect “index.html” to another domain using a 301-Moved permanently redirect.

2. If you need to redirect http://mysite.com to http://www.mysite.com and you’ve got mod_rewrite enabled on your server you can put this in your .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

or this:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Tip: Use your full URL (ie http://www.domain.com) when obtaining incoming links to your site. Also use your full URL for the internal linking of your site.

3. If you want to redirect your .htm pages to .php pages andd you’ve got mod_rewrite enabled on your server you can put this in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule (.*).htm$ /$1.php

4. If you wish to redirect your .html or .htm pages to .shtml pages because you are using Server Side Includes (SSI) add this code to your .htaccess file:

AddType text/html .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml .html .htm
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes
DirectoryIndex index.shtml index.html

Frequently Asked Question:
What’s the difference in using a 301 redirect versus a meta redirect?

Meta Redirect
To send someone to a new page (or site) put this in the head of your document:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”10; url=http://mynewsite.com/”>

Content=”10; tells the browser to wait 10 seconds before transfer, choose however long you would like, you can even choose 0 to give a smoother transition, but some (really old) browsers aren’t capable of using this so I’d suggest putting a link on that page to your new site for them.

With a meta redirect the page with the redirect issues a 200 OK status and some other mechanism moves the browser over to the new URL. With a 200 OK on both pages, the search engine wants to index both the start page and the target page – and that is a known spam method (set up 10,000 domains full of keywords for the search engines to index then meta redirect the “real visitor” after 0 or 1
seconds to the “real site” ) so using it gets you penalized.

The 301 redirect simply issues a Permanently Moved message in the HTTP header which tells the search engine to only
index the target URL.

Conclusion: The safest way to redirect old web pages to the new pages or old web site to the new web site and keep the same search engine rankings is to use the 301 redirect. It will also pass on the page rank from your old site to your new site.

Ask yourself: How many blogs do you read on daily basis and do you know owner/ authors of those blogs? Many of you will be knowing complete history about blog’s author/owner, right?

Now ask yourself again: How many blogs you read and you don’t know anything about their owner/author? Very few, aren’t they?
So why is this? Why people only love to read blogs about those who they know about?

Humans have tendency of allotting value to each and every entity. The more the value they allot, more they want to know about them.  Likewise same thing is applicable for websites and blogs. If you are a leader in some niche and dominate the marketplace users will love to read, buy, and share your stuff. And if you are not a leader but just an average guy, transparency factors can affect you the most, as no one knows about you why would they care reading, buying and sharing your stuff? The more you be transparent with your users, more they like you. It triggers the trust of being complete genuine person in the users mind.

How to be transparent?

Before you be transparent, you need to set your goals and targets in your mind. Once you do that you can act accordingly. Even tough being transparent is good thing, it also can hurt/damage you. So be careful on what you share and how you share. Try to be yourself and genuine. So here are the ways:

1. Have ‘About Me’ page: Having ’About Me’ helps user for understanding you more clearly. It is perhaps the most important thing you need on your website/blog. Having detailed ‘About Me’ page is big plus. Whenever I land on a blog for reading specific resource, I immediately search for ‘About Me’ page to know more about the author. Once he wins me over with his ‘About Me’ page, I subscribe to his RSS Feeds and keep monitoring him. There are many people like me out there, so don’t try to hurt us. J
2. Picture of you: Having picture of you on your website/blog is another factor of being genuine, don’t worry if you look ugly it really doesn’t matters. What matters is you are a real person. Add your picture on your about me page and wherever you feel appropriate.
3. About you on every page: This technique might not work for every websites but it definitely works for blogs. Adding a little piece of information about you on every page works great for readers like me. Also don’t forget adding Read More link which redirects to your about me page.
4. Share as much as you can: Many Internet Marketing Gurus or Experts shares as many things as they can, even how they got famous and how they get traffic and sales. This is the reason why they have such a great site with enormous amount of people subscribed/following their site. (Be careful here. Share as much as you can but not everything)

Sharing knowledge is not only going to win users heart but it can convince potential buyer to convert into real buyer for being a genuine and knowledgeable person.

This count was 231 Million in the earlier month survey.

But this count is not completely accurate, as it takes into account the responses from the users using Netcraft toolbar.

So its just like Alexa traffic rankings.