Some are free, others charge.

The key directories are:-

1) DM0Z (the open directory) 2) Yahoo 3) Business.com 4) MSNsmallbusiness

Some minor directories worth being listed in

5) Bluefind (paid) 6) Gimpsy 7) Allthebizz 8) Smallerbizz 9) Wowdirectory 10)Joeant

Google crawls sites continually, then periodically it updates data centres with a "fresh index", due to sheer size of data involved, this can't happen instantly so result around time of re-index appear to jump around.

Each time you browse google you receive data from one of data centres, this is often closest geographically, but depends on traffic etc.

Interested to see your results on a different data centre? Copy one of URL's above into your browser. If results are different on any of centres a re-index is in progress.

Google also has two test domains www2.google.com and www3.google.com, these are used to try out new search algorithms, so if your interested to see what might be your results in future, try seaching on these, bear in mind that not all experimental algorithms Google develops become part of main one.

Clare Lawrence is CEO of Discount Domains Ltd – A leading UK provider of Domain name registration and Web Hosting services. Please feel free to re-publish this article provided this reference box remains together with a hyperlink to http://www.discountdomainsuk.com Clare can also be contacted on clare@discountdomainsuk.com.