If something has value, you should be prepared to pay for that
value. There is nothing inherently wrong or dishonest with free-to-submit
directories. In theory, you get a listing, (or at least a review), free of
charge because the directory is getting data to fill it’s directory providing
value to it’s users. The trick here is not giving up your data AND still
getting spammed beyond recognition.
Pay for listing or review is also not inherently bad.
Keeping in mind that most review sites only came to be to satisfy a misguided
demand for page rank which no one can guarantee except Google. The trick here
is knowing what the value is and whether you will get a positive return for your
fee.
Only you can decide what you are willing to pay and feel
good about but I can tell you the ones worth paying the most for are the ones
that can actually send you some traffic that converts. That has always been and
will always be.
Auto directory
submissions aren’t worth much and you’ll get submitted to a lot of directories
that will make you realize you can get something for free and still be ripped
off.
BUT, I believe there are a LOT of directories that can do
your site some good in a lot of ways and even the worst ones you submit to will
do you no good but they won’t hurt you either. I’ve submitted a lot of sites to
a lot of directories a lot of different ways and I don’t know of a single site
being penalized because it was submitted to or listed in any directory.
The FREE Directory
Submission Process
I’ve put a lot of stock into
directory submissions long before Yahoo started charging for reviews and DMOZ
was still little more than a sparkle in Rich Skrenta’s eye. SearchKing was actually born in 97 when Jude
Lacour and I first partnered on a directory after meeting at the Warriors
forum, (http://www.warriorforum.com). I
can’t even remember the name of the engine we built now. WebWombat or some such nonsense.
This was long before Jude became a very
wealthy man in the pharmaceutical industry and I became the grandfather of the link brokering
industry. Still wondering if I made the right
choice. But I digest. Like I said, I have a LOT of experience with directories
and there are some who say experience is what you get when you are looking for
something else. Whatever ----- experience I have loads of.
Directories, (especially niche
directories), have always played a vital role in the development and direction
of the web. In my opinion they still do.
There is the perception within the SEO community that
selling links degraded the value of a large number of directories and while
there are some good ones; many, a great
many, deserve to be devalued and even punished by Google and that submitting to the “bad” ones will do
no good and may even cause harm.
Recently there have been reports about directories getting
busted en masse thus indicating there is no longer any value to promoting your
site to free directories or paying for a review.
http://www.seobook.com/what-do-you-call-yourself
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-makes-a-good-web-directory-and-why-google-penalized-dozens-of-bad-ones
IS THE PARTY OVER FOR DIRECTORIES?
Even the undisputed king of link Eric Ward, (http://www.ericward.com), has recently
stated on The SearchReturn Discussion List:
> As hard as it is for the hundreds of no-name general
directories
to accept, the recent devaluing of their links has been predicted
by those of us old timers for years. Frankly, I hope they have
saved any money they made, because the party is over.<
Eric Ward is very smart, been around forever, proven his
ability many times over and mostly he is one of those people that when they
speak, smart webmasters listen and listen carefully. I have nothing but the
utmost respect for him and as much as I hate to, I kind of disagree with the
party being over thing.
I would agree that a lot of old-timers, (such as myself),
have predicted the downfall as a business model of directories that were set up
simply to capitalize on the links for page rank hysteria, but I don’t see just
being a no-name general directory as being any reason to call a cab to take me
home from the dead party.
The fact is there have always been a LOT of little known directories
and the industry just keeps getting bigger. There have always been great ones,
good ones, ones nobody cared much about and ones that were the very definition
of spam crap. But there are a great many little no-name directories that I
believe do provide some value worthy of a small effort and/or financial
investment. Especially ones that are specific to a location or topic.
Whether the party is over or not, the point remains that
there are and always have been, (and likely always will be), directories that
would do you some good and some that wouldn’t.
Some are free and some are paid for a listing or a review. Some send traffic, some pass a little juice,
some do both and some do none of the above. So the big question becomes do we ignore
them or submit to them and if we decide they really do provide some marketing
value, how do we determine which ones are worth what?
About 3 years ago, after the 3,000th or so SEO blog or forum
post about a top 100 directory list I had seen, I decided to instruct some of
my staff to do our own reviews and compile a database of what we referred to as
“premium” directories that we then sold to clients as a premium submission
service and charged a premium rate.
We followed what could be considered the conventional
criteria for determining quality. Age of
site, PR, quality of listings, number or listings, whether they were for real
or just hustling your email or begging for a backlink, etc. We used a scoring
system of 1 thru 5 with 5 being the highest.
Anything below a 3 we discarded and just threw back into the cheap,
fast, automated submit pile.
The thing I found odd was that clients bought the service
because they didn’t want to take the time to do their own reviews, that is smart
business BUT many of them didn’t mind reviewing every one we submitted to. I’m
sure it has something to do with how as humans the fear of not getting as good
a deal as we MIGHT have is a great
motivator after the fact. We won’t take the time to do it ourselves but we’ll
certainly take the time to check to make sure we aren’t being cheated by the
people we pay to do the job for us. Maybe that is only as it should be. Whatever.
That is how it is.
Over time we started to realize that it really didn’t seem
to matter much in terms of benefit to the target site. The directories that one
client would complain about did as much good as the one that another client loved. So, we just kept adding to the list until
finally we dropped the premium tag and just hand submitted to the entire list
by charging for the number of submissions the client ordered because we were
simply basing the fees on the time it took.
SHIFTING FROM PAGE RANK TO TRUST RANK
Then about 2 years ago, I started seeing some fundamental
changes in the search engine placement landscape. I could see the focus was shifting
from Page Rank to Trust Rank. http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=426
The more things we could do that could instill trust in a target
site or term the better. Links were as
important as ever but we could see that HOW they were important was changing.
Now we get into a little of the “Art” of SEO. Art being basically
another term for “my opinion”. The art of seo is about taking what you see and
using all resources available to you, including the many successes and failures
of the past, using them to make educated guesses and being right a lot more
than you are wrong.
If you were a search engine engineer, would you expect the
average webmaster to promote his site by submitting to relevant
directories? My answer is yes and that is
the primary reason I believe niche directories have value in promoting a
website online.
If you were a search engine engineer which would you trust more?
A site that had been submitted to 3,000 directories all the same day or a site
that had been submitted to a relevant category in a few niche directories over
a period of time?
My gut tells me that any reasonably intelligent person, or
even a programmer, would expect any webmaster to look for and submit to directories
that were even remotely relevant to their site or term. To my mind, NOT submitting to relevant
directories would raise more red flags than seeing links coming from directories
that were related to the theme of the site. As long as it was pretty obvious that
the submission was not automated, (hundreds in minutes is a pretty good clue to
automation), that the webmaster had taken some time to “select” this particular
directory and this particular category and as long as it had a reasonable title
and description, it was an indication that this person was simply trying to
promote their site without trying to spam anyone.
So, whether it’s free or paid for review, taking the time to
select an “appropriate” directory and category that you feel could benefit your
site, writing a proper title and description that indicates you care what someone
reading it would think of your site and
doing these things on a schedule that a human could actually do is not only a
good way to promote your site on a virtually non –existent budget but I also
think it helps to build a little trust in your site. It is natural, logical and
should be done because it is kind of like online promotion 101.
Ahhh, but whose got the time? Doing all this is no doubt
time consuming and in my opinion, the debate should not be about whether
directories have value, rather it should be, “is it worth it?”
So, I built my service to slow down, select only directories
that meet the “premium” criteria and manually submit based on:
#1. The relevance to the target sites overall theme
#2. The client’s selected keyword/phrases, (we use our own
little premium database to do exact match searches)
#3. To submit varying titles and descriptions by hand to
compliment the specific directory
#4. Spread the submissions over a 30 day period
Because of the time it takes, I’m not the cheapest but remember,
there is hardly anything in the world that another man can’t produce with less
quality and sell for less. For those who consider price alone, they are that
man’s legal prey.
Be warned that submitting your site to 250 directories is
not going to magically whisk your site to #1. It helps and should be done as a
basic promotional step like I mentioned but it is just another brick in the
wall.
We’re just about
ready to release my little premium directory database and make it available to
the public. That will pretty much kill the directory submission industry but to
be honest there are better things to focus on that produce better results faster.
That takes care of the free directories, or as we call it, the
DSP.
Next I think I’ll cover what we call “the bible”. It’s the
on page stuff that we have turned into a process that we perform on every site
every time. After we do those things THEN we can get creative. It will probably
bore the heck out of most of you, but The Guru feels it is somewhat obligatory.
Damnit! Quit jumpin on that bed!
Peace Y’all
The SEO Guru