It’s Good to be SEO
Blog about SEO for Webmasters
Posted Directories, Google, seo, submit on Friday, December 21st, 2007.
There are so many directories on the net where you can submit for free or for a price. You probably have seen some advertisements of such dirs like “Top 100 (insert topic here) sites” or “Free submit directory” or any other fancy name. There are directories oriented only to one or a couple of topics. They are called Niche Directories. The niche dirs may help you by adding more value to the link that points to your site from them. This happens because the search engines respect links to your site from sites that are on the same or similar topic. For example if you have a site for dogs you should submit to directories that collect sites only for dogs or for animals. On the contrary if you submit your dogs site to a directory for jewelry you will not have the good vote from that site and the search engines may rank you for jewelry instead for dog oriented keywords.
That was for the topic of the directory. But there are another even more important thing that a webmaster have to know before submitting.
In the past (but not so many years ago) there were so called Free For All or FFA directories/sites. Such sites receive thousands of links everyday and show them immediately on the BIG main page without a human intervention or any kind of moderation. That way many links come and go every minute from the from page of the FFA site. They were giving the sites the needed link but one have to submit to that directory hourly or daily to be visible on the page constantly. Google saw that and banned those sites. Still such sites come and go from the SERPS and dome directories and even good sites may look like FFA if they overrun with links and advertisement. You may never see such site now but be careful anyway.
Ok. You have found a good directory to submit now. It’s not FFA and you’ve been lucky enough to find a niche dir. What’s next?
Many of the good directories now suggest you to pay a small and not so small(Yahoo dir ~ $300/year) price and your site will be included within 24 - 72 hours after a review from a directory editor. They give you some kind of advertising on the same directory often on all pages. With advertising links on the directory your site may show for a month or forever on the front page and other good pages inside the directory. And by good you may consider the Google PageRank of the page and check for yourself how many links are pointing to that page, is that page hidden by nofollow and noindex meta tags or from the robots.txt file or by JavaScript redirection. So if the page is good and with high value(pagerank - inbound links) you can spend some money and buy such link.
There is a story about that Google is banning sites that are paying for links to increase their PageRank but this will be explained later in my blog. Paid links for inclusion in the directories are 99% not the same thing. The other 1% are directories that play bad and Google and other webmaster can see that so such sites are banned. However I will give you some directories approved by the big SEOs around the Internet so me and you will be safe with them.
Some directories give you a permanent paid link to your site as well as option to edit the title, description and the keywords shown in the directory pages. Others want you to pay monthly or every year and they demand a very good price for that. I’ve seen small new dirs that want to make the webmaster rich for a couple of months. Such dirs want the biggest prices for inclusion of your sites. You should be careful with that too. Pay attention to the authority of the directory and then even think about submitting to it.
The free submit option in the directories is good too. It’s the same inclusion in the dir’s page as the paid option. Bu often you will have to give a reciprocal link from your site to that directory so you will be decreasing the value of the link to your site except the following situation: the directory page where your site will be sitting will have more authority than the page of your links where you put the reciprocal link to that dir. So you win at least for a while. With the free submitions you will never know when the directory webmaster will delete your listing just because it’s old or something else or the webmaster is not in the mood for giving a free food anymore. You may loose hundreds of links pointing to your site after a while if they are submitted to low quality sites or for free. But if you have the time and organization to check periodically if your links are in the dir you’ll be ok with the Free option.
Another thing you should take care of is if the page where your site’s listing will stay in the dir is so deep in the dir’s structure that no spider detected ever that page or search engines crawl that page not so often. You can check the last cached date of a page in Google if you type the following and press Search: site:directorysite.com . You will see all of the indexed pages of that directory and click the Cache button under the page where your site will be. The date of the last cache is written above in the Google bar inserted in the page. If you cannot find the desired page with the “site:” command try site:directorysite.com/something/something2/desiredpage.html . That way you will see if that page is in the index if it has cache and how long it takes to that page to be crawled. If the page is more that three levels deep in the site you may never be seen as listed in the directory and there will be no value from the link in that page to your site.
Many directories as well as blogs and more and more sites now use the nofollow attribute within the links code to tell Google and others that they are not giving a vote for the site they are linking to. The nofollow attribute is invented by Google so the webmasters can manually tell the search engines that they only show that link to the users not the search engines. That way many affiliate links are filtered from the search engine and that helps the blogs to not be spammed and later banned for too many links pointing to every good or bad page. Simillar to the previous nofollow attribute is the noindex/nofollow atribute in the META tags. That way previous pages may tell the search engine to now crawl the page with your link and you will be out of the game again. The same may happen if the page is disabled for the search engines by the robots.txt file. Some webmaster even use JavaScript redirection that is visible only to humans(now Google reads javascript links but with no 100% success). There are redirections from the server script languages as well. So be carefull if the link pointing to your site will be visible to the search engines.(More about the technical side of how you can be sure a link is a real and good link : in a later article about Firefox extensions and looking through the html code).
There is a way to show the search engines something and to show the users something else. This is called Cloaking and I do not recommend that even to the good ol’ webmasters out there. The directories in our situation can use cloaking to hide the links pointing to other sites and show the search engine only a huge text content with some links pointing elsewhere. That way all of the submitted sites are out of the link value from that dir.
So let’s make a resume of the whole thing: you should find a good niche directory that is not using some way to hide its pages or to devalue the links pointing to your site, you may pay for that link if the directory is good and valuable or submit for free but check from time to time if your link is still there(if the free dir is still there) , be aware of directories that give paid links but have so low quality.
And finally some directories from the best of all times Aaron Wall’s SeoBook website:
www.dmoz.org - Was good now if you wait 6 months and they list you you are lucky and may win some traffic.
dir.yahoo.com - really good but expensive. If you have the money buy a link there.
www.business.com - I like that one too. It’s paid and is B2B oriented.
sbd.bcentral.com - the Microsoft’s one
www.joeant.com - I am an editor here and I like my job!
www.botw.org - Good!
www.gimpsy.com - Very Good!
I have comments only for the half of the dirs above. When I have the time and some free money I’ll try them for sure.
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