Is it true directory submissions are no longer a good SEO strategy?

[LinuxFreelancer]

@ULTiMATE

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.

I would agree if it was not converting to adsense clicks ($42.58 /this month out of 21,823 imps). My traffic sources are mainly from Google, Bing, Yahoo and Yandex for keyphrases like:

sullivan county summer day camp
arts & humanities websites in canada
games websites
driaconsulting.com
segst
warhammer colonial wargames ruled
william norton legear
badminton association of india fixture
us dart rankings
wallasey darts league fixtures
gem 550 practical boat owner
recommended sites drain cleaning
boxing links
free native american dreamweaver clipart
guernsey tourism directory
biomedical engineering websites -jobs
gambling anonymous oahu meetings
wallasey darts league
cdb openaccess milkyway
email informational sources directories
srila bhakti raksaka sridhar deva goswami maharaj commentary on buddhism
fantasy football dynasty league draft team rankings
inurl submit.php free listing
rentable websites
udorn ab thailand secuity police 1975
ace murder mystery
light horse plume world war two

[Stevie_D]

@LinuxFreelancer

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’m not saying they’re forged user agents, but I suspect a lot of them might be search robots. Given that a third of your traffic (by hits) is from robots rather than people, there’s a lot of scope for most of those referrals to be robots.

And, does your site actually appear on those directories? I know that I get ‘referrals’ from all sorts of sites that would never in a million years have a link to my site, but I’m sure these are bots deliberately putting that referral in my logs to try attract back links.

No, it isn’t true that no-one uses directories to search the web … but they are nowhere near as popular as they were 10 years ago. In terms of ‘real person’ traffic attractors, they’re likely to be less significant than any of the top 10 search engines (and can you even think of 10 search engines?). Part of the reason for that is because people are now so habituated to just googling for everything, and part is because directories became easy targets for black hat SEOers and in many cases became diluted and full of spam.

[elalcaudon]

Yes, after the Update of Panda by Google, the effect submitting an Article in more article directories is not effective… Submitting an article in one sites will gives a better ranking now. So avoid submitting a same article in more article sites.

[LinuxFreelancer]

@Stevie_D

I’m not saying they’re forged user agents, but I suspect a lot of them might be search robots. Given that a third of your traffic (by hits) is from robots rather than people, there’s a lot of scope for most of those referrals to be robots.

And, does your site actually appear on those directories? I know that I get ‘referrals’ from all sorts of sites that would never in a million years have a link to my site, but I’m sure these are bots deliberately putting that referral in my logs to try attract back links.

Yeah I am listed in them. I used to have a big issue with referrer spam but then I setup some code in apache to filter out the majority of it using custom rules in conjunction with mod_security… though anyone using mod_security should setup a whitelist first and foremost because out of the box, it blocks Googlebot.

I setup my main directory to log every hit in the DB with the user agents, referrer, query string, ip address and timestamp of the hit. This way I can blacklist effectively against different types of bots. You can usually spot the bots with a masked ua, because they visit pages a lot faster than a real user. So, if an ip not whitelisted has X amount of pageviews in 60 seconds, I am notified to manually investigate it.

@elalcaudon

Yes, after the Update of Panda by Google, the effect submitting an Article in more article directories is not effective… Submitting an article in one sites will gives a better ranking now. So avoid submitting a same article in more article sites.

I submit my articles only to my own sites and I notify Google, Bing, Ask and Yahoo of the updated sitemap instantly to try to get spidered before any scrapers copy my stuff.

“So avoid submitting a same article in more article sites.” Well, I would not be worried about that so much, Google will not delist you or penalize you, they will just index the article location it believes to be the original.

When I bought Crackfeed.Com (my tutorial site), it had 10K articles that were scraped. It still got PR3 (no penalty) and also a lot of traffic for those articles. Though I removed them because they sucked and were all pretty worthless to my readers.

[LinuxFreelancer]

@preatorian

I think directories are still effective in SEO.

Oh, it is. However, you have to be careful and investigate the dirs before listing there:

1. Are they picky and at least keep out blatant spam?

2. How old is the creation or registration date of the domain?

3. Checkout the site with google toolbar to make sure it ain’t white-barred or grey-barred.

4. Will the dir owner provide traffic stats?

5. Does the dir charge money for links? I do not mean for “reviews”, I mean you pay and get listed instantly. [VERY BAD]

6. Check Yahoo site explorer for backlinks.

7. Not a perfect tool, but I find it a decent measurment of quality… Alexa Rank. Some will argue with me on this, but it is not totally useless… it is usually accurate with my sites… then again I also filter out a lot of bots.

[system]

Directory submission is still worthy. Niche directory submission helps to bring targeted traffic and increase the link popularity. It better to do directory submission with more authority site.

[steavewa]

Well as for my opinion directory submission is still effective , although it don’t give’s you all the traffic but help’s you get some traffic. And you can get back link to your website which can help increasing Page Rank for your website.

[welcome_alexray]

The sites should be good in which you’re submitting your link. Also selecting a category related to your niche is also much important. Many of the new SEO guys keep doing this for the starting of the project, after a few time it is not that much effective.

[Promoman]

It does seem that content rich sites are more valued for links vs. just link farms. Examples are article sites or blogs where you can link your site.

[brianjoefalco]

True… but i still doing this strategy… but I carefully select the sites… high PR, Date Launch, and traffic… of course I don’t want to waste my time submitting to those DIR sites that is useless.

[usta]

Quality directories still good for seo but you should be very strict about the quality of it. On directory4u.org we accept only sites with unique description and see very good effect on google.

[SpanishNick]

If they are directories that Google trusts like Yahoo then there a brilliant idea. Also getting on DMOZ wont do you any harm either

[system]

@Stevie_D

No, it isn’t true that no-one uses directories to search the web … but they are nowhere near as popular as they were 10 years ago. In terms of ‘real person’ traffic attractors, they’re likely to be less significant than any of the top 10 search engines (and can you even think of 10 search engines?). Part of the reason for that is because people are now so habituated to just googling for everything, and part is because directories became easy targets for black hat SEOers and in many cases became diluted and full of spam.

I agree that it is not at all true that no one uses directory for searching but they are less popular now a days. Completely agree.It is well known white hat technique but how directories are targeted by black Hat SEO’s?

[system]

Hi, I think it is a good way to earn backlink for a website in its early stages.

[Stevie_D]

@Asher ross

Hi, I think it is a good way to earn backlink for a website in its early stages.

With the exception of DMOZ, directories have very little value. Yes, you can use them to get easy backlinks, but those backlinks are hardly worth anything. At any stage of the process, whether you’re in the early stages or with a well established site, you can usually get more bang for your buck by putting your efforts into developing and improving your site, and building high quality backlinks.

[paulcj2]

Thanks all.

[system]

Well I don’t think is a bad thing. The reality is that a couple of years ago … it was important … now it helps ( you should do it ) but not so much as in the past.
My argument: if you manage to enter to sites like dmoz.org … you will see the difference in search positions.

[GeorgeB]

Seeing SEOs do the SEO snob thing (don’t use directories, blog comments, forum sigs etc) is often bitter sweet for me.

On one hand they are misinforming my competition for me, but on the other hand I kinda feel bad for the noobs taking it as the gospel.

I have several sites I’ve done key phrase research, targeted the right keywords/key phrases (20k monthly exact match searches or more), then used only those sources for links and now rank #1 in Google and make anywhere from $100 to $500 per month per site in Adsense alone.

There is no single answer for all sites in terms of SEO strategy. It depends on your niche, the search competition for your given keywords, and a bunch of other things. For some niches you can launch a site and use directories as part of the strategy to get your sites indexed and ranking and it works fine. Anyone telling you otherwise probably has no real world experience in terms of targeting long-tail or low competition keywords -OR- they haven’t done it in so long they just believe what SEO snobs are writing about it and joyfully perpetuate the misinformation.

Just remember this when considering some self-proclaimed SEO guru’s advice… In the SEO snob world, everyone likes to be the first to claim this is dead, or that doesn’t work anymore. It makes them seem like they are on the cutting edge of what’s happening in the search algos. Truth is if they don’t work for Google they are literally guessing unless they’ve done their own case studies and even then the results can suffer from their own biased desire to prove something doesn’t work anymore.

Do your own case studies and find out what works for you in your niche.

There’s so much low hanging fruit out there and as long as we have folks continuously being misinformed I guess there will just be more for the rest of us

[mr_moro]

there are a lot of useful directories - you should try to puild a huge base of backlinks for your website. any backlink will benfite your site on search engines

[Alicia_Allen]

Yes directory submission is not as effective now as it was before but if you submit your link in High PR directories than it can help you to some extent.