Is Directory Submission Worth the Effort?
76Incansoft's DirectoryBot
Some say Directory Submission is Dead
First there was reciprical link building. Then Google caught on and began discounting reciprical links. After that blogs and wikis began to appear and rampant SPAM forced wide spread usage of the NoFollow tag.
After Reciprical linking came Directories. Now some say Directories are being discounted by Google as well and that you get little for the time and effort you put into doing hundreds of submissions.
I've submitted a couple of sites to directories. This doesn't make me an expert but my experience has been basically positive.
My Experience with Directory Submission
I run a highly technical engineering site in a small niche. As a result I was being largely ignored by Google in favor of Wikipedia (here's their article on web directories). Then I submitted my site to about 350 directories over the course of a few days (10 minutes here, 10 minutes there until it was done).
After submitting my site to the directories my page rank didn't change but my site was getting crawled much more frequently. This meant my new pages were included in Google's search results in a couple of days.
Within a few weeks many of my pages were showing up in the top ten of the "long tail keywords". My site's topic area is Control Systems and the top ten search results for that keyword are dominated by Wikipedia, IEEE, and universities. It is unlikely that I will ever knock them off their top spots for that keyword. However, there are specific design and analysis topics (those "long tail keywords") where those sites have little or no presence allowing me to rank high. It wasn't until a few weeks after I completed my Directory Submissions until I achieved those high ranking spots. Often with articles that had been on my site for months. (In my other Hub on Directory Submission I go through the benefits of Directory Submission in more detail.)
Traffic = Happy
Established Sites Don't Need to Submit; New Ones Do
Obviously, if you run an established site with a page rank above 4 then you don't need to bother with directory submission. I'd guess you've already done it but don't need it now. However, if your site is new or lacking inbound, one-way, links then directories still help. Submission to the web directories is free, software is available to significantly decrease the required time, and the links are (mostly) permenant.
I wouldn't recommend writing new anchor text for every directory. In fact I would recommend doing the bare minimum for directory submission and worry about more important things.
My links
- My wiki - Control Systems at ControlTheoryPro.com
This is the highly technical engineering site I mentioned. Just here because I'm proud of it. - Cheap Website Directory Submitter
I have tried several Directory Submission programs. This is the one I use currently (direct link provided, not an affiliate link).
CommentsLoading...
I'd be interested in seeing if writing an article and submitting it to article directories would help your site.
Unfortunately, this article seems to attract a lot of SPAM comments like - Good job! (with a link of course). I have no problem with people linking to their sites if their comments are valid to the article and meaningful. Don't just say - I agree; Good Job; I'll check back on this often...
As far as directory submission goes I've moved over to a piece of software from IncanSoft. It's faster and better in IMHO.
@Bob
If article marketing didn't work you wouldn't have included a link to your site in your comment...
For those who honestly want to know. My experience with article marketing is that it can work very well if you choose your keyword correctly, stick to no more than 600 words, and follow many of Ezine's recommendations on your article - most importantly the title.
However, I've paid for a few article marketing tools to do mass submission and found them to be a waste of time. The only site to ever drive significant amounts of traffic to my site or show up as a backlink was Ezine. Every other site was a waste of time. I've seen threads on the WarriorForum stating that others have had success with other article directories. I have not but I intend to give those other directories another go with hand crafted - no spinning - articles to some established and some new sites.
i just submit my website to 4 new 5PR directories but still i don't seen any changes with my search results in google i think i waste my money on that thing and still have to work with google adwords :(
@vivky
How long has it been since you submitted?
Here's how I usually do it. I use a tool - I've used several at this point - to submit to dozens of directories not just 4 or 5. The better, higher PR, directories often take weeks or even months to approve your submission. However, once submitted you really don't need to do anything else you can move on to other backlinking strategies.
Here's the thing about directory submission. Directory submission alone doesn't seem to be worth much. However, directory submission does seem to amplify the effects of my other SEO and backlinking efforts. Especially article marketing.
It can take months for your submission to show up on the directories and be counted by Google. You could ping the links once they are approved but that requires a lot of monitoring and manual effort - only really worth it if you are running a couple of sites. And frankly Google spiders the sites that really count multiple times a day.
Remember directory submission alone isn't worth that much anymore. But it does seem to amplify your other backlinking efforts making it worthwhile.
spradlig,
In my opinion,
Directory submissions should be done with attention to the traffic value,
This isn’t to say that directory submissions will have no SEO benefit – in some cases it will have some benefit at least to some degree – but if you do it with traffic in mind, and only submit to directories you believe will refer targeted traffic, then any SEO benefit is a bonus.
Make sure you submit to the relevant category.
@nitGreen
I can appreciate that perspective. However, I am more inclined towards a shotgun approach where you use software to submit to hundreds of directories. If you've bought decent software then the better directories really ought to be included - with the exception of Yahoo (paid) and DMOZ (months, maybe years, maybe never for approvals).
Some SEO I've read suggests not hitting all the sites at once as this look fishy to Google. However, since the different sites approve the listings at different time intervals and since Google doesn't spider the lesser sites all that often I question whether staggering your submissions is really necessary. Their approval is staggered as is meaning they show up on the sites in a staggered fashion. Then Google spiders these sites but not every page on every site every day so it may be days before Google finds your newly added site on the directory - further staggering when Google finds the backlinks.
All of this means it takes months before the full potential of the directory submission is realized but it is a once and done SEO effort that can be handled in 20 or 30 minutes per site you are providing to the directories.
I still submit manually. Im still not sure its worth all the effort. Maybe I should out source it. Im still not convinced with some of the software available
@spradlig I have been manually submitting articles to article directories and one thing is for sure, if you want people to crawl your site instead of Google Bots you have to submit quality content. People like to visit sites which are owned by people with knowledge.
Submitting the same or spinned article is now out of question because if you are submitting the same content on 350 sites bots will stop visiting and mark you as spam.
A word of caution! don't even have a fixed resource box when targeting a keyword. Contact me if you want to learn more :)
@Owais
The conclusion that Google will mark your site as SPAM for having portions of your content (identitcal portions) in lots and lots of sites on the web is questionable and I don't buy it.
First, if that were true then I could simply copy a few pages from my competitor's site and post them to every site directory and article directory on the planet. Voila I've gotten my competitor marked as SPAM. My Google ranking improves without really needing a quality site. Once upon a time SEO meant submitting your competitors' sites a link farm and getting them de-indexed. Not anymore...
Second, many of the directory sites and social bookmarking sites automatically scrape the page in question so they can auto-populate the description, keywords, etc. from the page's meta tags. So, if your conjecture were true, a thousand legit bookmarks back to your site from lazy visitors could cause you to be marked as SPAM.
From what I have heard (but haven't proven) duplicate content will have less effect than original. But, how original is original? And, how much does context within the site that is hosting the link matter?
My experience is that directory submission helps in the long term for your site. While backlinking strategies such as social bookmarking provide an immediate (if small) traffic boost and improvement in Google bot's crawl rate and number of pages indexed on your site.
@spradlig
Google Panda has changed the way content farms like Ezine were looked up with awe to improve backlinking. Ezine has almost vanished from SERP, especially from Google. Thats what has happened. It may have a high Alexa ranking but Google still holds 86% of the search engine market. That is what makes
YOUR BLOG IS TOO GOOD
directory submitting 100% successful.
Nicely put together thanks for sharing.
all of the outfits are fabulous!
Ok...Should I spend time manually submitting to directories? Or should I just pay someone to do it for me. Ezinearticles is dead or pretty close to it. Panda and Penguin update has wiped out tons of legitimate sites. Why? Because Google says so! At some point it has to stop and REAL people have to take over.
Paul
sunil 2 years ago
Good one