I just received this comment in response to a post on directory submissions: “You are wasting your time with directory submission. It is only slightly better then looking at your meta keywords tag and optimizing it.” Do you agree?
Just came across this post, seems like I missed it during my spam reporting.
Anyway, links from directories matter as much as weak links do. It’s simple, provable logic that if you have a page with x number of links you’ll get a amount of link juice divisible by x from that page. A directory contains a number of links from a page, all at least three levels away from the popular page.
If we’re going to play that game, fine.
One of the sites I work on gets around 50k visitors a day, built from nothing over several years and away from any major brand or affiliation within its sector.
All of this has been done largely with NO SEO techniques whatsoever. Any online action we receive is a result of marketing and/or brand building. If we get good links then it’s because we run a good service.
Google ranks pages, not websites. The reason that page will be more popular (debatable again, as we have no control over other websites within the index who may affect the search result) will be because it has more links. It doesn’t matter if they’re rubbish links or if they’re front-page links from the Google home page. If three men, one with no money, one with 1p and one with £1M entered a richest man contest then the man with 1p would still be ahead of the man with nothing.
All you’ve stated in this post and others is that the only way you can justify your ideas is through a façade of success you build around yourself. None of us care if your ideas work for you, because all that matters is what there is evidence for.
As with most SEO ideas on this site, they can be debunked with nothing but common sense. You’re more than welcome to provide further ideas and evidence, and those that read these posts will benefit from it, especially if a breakthrough is made.
Yes. It’s been about as valuable as that for years. Directories are mostly link farms with no PR on the internal pages and so many links out that they don’t really pass any PR even if they’re not penalized. Only in specific niches do actual people use directories to find sites, so they’re not a significant source of traffic for most sites. There’s almost no value in a listing on one.
I have found that links deep in low ranking directories often never get indexed by google. Many sites don’t even respond to you request for inclusion. I know only try directories that are pr4 and higher but still have trouble with them.
Most of the directories do not have adequate content present. These directories rely mostly on links and description content. Most of the links submitted in these directories are submitted to several hundred other directories and each listing is using duplicate ANCHOR and DESCRIPTION.
This could be one of the reasons why directories are loosing their power and popularity in SEO arena.
do submission in high PR directories
We cannot say that there is no use of submitting links in directories. In one way it is useful that is, by submitting links in high PR directories we can able to make our new websites or blogs get index in Google and other SE fast. I don’t think nowadays Google gives much importance for those directories that contains thousands of links for ranking a website. Its trend is almost over i think. Better change to some other strategies for SEO. Thanks.
In response to everyone below Dan Grossman, high PR directories are completely worthless too. The page your link is on won’t be of a high PR, and even if it was it wouldn’t matter because PR is only a small ranking factor.
Directory submission is the Base of one way SEO technique.All directories are not useless,use high PR directories.
Erm…Look two posts above this one and read. High PR directories are useless.
well link building still covers 43 % of your total SEO strategy. It was 67% in the year 2009.
But still lot of importance that search engine is giving to link from higher sites. You should have link coming to your sites from variety of PR sites.
Links from high PR are always good but you should also get link from new sites as google will consider this a search engine friendly technique.
Thanks all, for your input. This seems to be a controversial topic. Are there any studies out there that can confirm that directory submissions are or not useful for gaining PR, DA, or PA?
No, that is a myth. You just have to be wise as to the directory. If they are picky about who gets in and they have a lot of good serps themselves, it is a safe bet.
Matt Cutts has stated that Google has nothign against directories unless they charge for links without filtering out bad “spammy” links. So paying for a listing but having to wait for review is ok, but paying and instantly being listed is bad.
May not be good for PR or SEO, but I still think you can get some traffic from directories.
No, you do not. Users do not use directories. You get zero traffic from them.
Incorrect. I get traffic from quite a few of them. Again, comments without facts are not helpful, Sir.
Not all are directories, I filtered via the term “direct”. This is from one of my directories, listed in other directories.
And what is that as a proportion of your total traffic? Does your stats package distinguish between live traffic and bots in those stats?
Now you cannot tell me that all of these are forged user agents. Wait a minute, why I am I having to prove a theory wron that offers no evidence at all? Directories do not send traffic? Funny, I myuself have used directories like Greenstalk and DMOZ. I must be the only person on Earth that uses them to actually visit the sites they list.
I think directories are still effective in SEO.
These figures mean nothing without additional evidence to back them up. We need to know over what time these have happened, how long these users spent on your site, etc. I don’t debate the fact that there are people who will click on such links, but anyone with a brain wants quality traffic; people who visit a site and leave after a few seconds are nothing but bandwidth thieves.
As a note, when reading statistics regarding SEO on the web please keep this in mind, as it’s the kind of thing that makes statisticians weep at night.