Jeff wrote a blog post about web directories in SEJ with some good tips for us directory owners and submitters. I'm posting this here just in case some of you aren't regular readers of SEJ.
Cool, that was a good read. Thanks for posting it here and thanks Jeff for taking the time to write it.
wow that is a awesome post, also I read a blog post by John scott where he experimented on two similar websites... out of which one was submitted to authority directories & other one to 700 + free directories. Not to mention that the one submitted to few authority directories fared well in serps & also had a higher pagerank & compared to the other site.
that's a great post! Absolutely agreed, a few paid directories is a lot better than lot's of free directories!
Some good points made. I disagree with point one, i dont personally think that submitting to hundreds of free directories will be a waste of time or damage anything, unless their appallingly kept and full of the most unsavoury type of sites, but there are hundreds of very good, very well kept free directories out their. Free does not mean poor, dont turn your nose up at free. It is natural that a paid directory owner will tell you that many free directories are inferior and that you should only submit to their paid directories, i think to comment fairly and be polite to everyone i would suggest a bit of both. Not everyone has the funds to spend constantly on promotion, that doesn't mean that they have no place in the directory world. If you can get something for free then use it, take it, make the most of it. I very much agree with points 5 and 6.
An excellent read, good job Jeff! As pipes said though, thats not going to put me off from submitting to lots of free directories when launching my next directory or promoting my current directory.
I agree with some points. Submitting to 300+ directories would definitely do bad than good. Probably penalized. I would rather submit to a few strong directories ( free or paid ) but I don't have that much $$$ I submit to paid when I can
I would not agree with the first four points. a)Submitting to free directories will affect search engine results.(Google) This is absolutely wrong as the Search Engine looks links from the directories only as back links and they do not look from another point of view suppose out of 1000 Free directories if a site is listed in 700 Free directories it indicates that a site is of good quality than a site which has been listed in only 300 free directories. Also this indicates that site owner is very much interested in the development of site as he is submitting to as many as directories. This indicates that the Search Engines are very much blind in judging the quality of a site. b)Submitting to Yahoo Directory: Instead of submitting to a Single Yahoo directory if a site is submitted to some free directories some directories may reject a site for lack of quality content.This will allow webmasters to realise their mistakes and correct it accordingly And also they can spend it on other useful additions to a site rather than submitting to a big directory.as it will not do any thing good to overall quality of the site. c)Directories should be only classified on basis of quality and not on quantity of back links.: The quantity of back links only indicate the traffic the directory is receiving and not the quality.Quality of the directory is mainly associated with listings in the directory. d)Alexa data is not dependable.: It is best illustrated by this example. Your site :www.avivadirectory.com has a higher rank than www.alivedirectory.com I bet that Alive directory has more visitors than yours. This is simply illustrated by the amount of backlinks difference between the two. Alexa rank would be higher for those sites that have Alexa thumbnail on it!
Its interesting that someone would say that directories are dead when i dont see social bookmarks as being all that myself. While they (social bookmarks) may play a minor roll in the algo if any i dont see them being anywhere close to the power of some strong directories. Dont get me wrong ive had some Tagged or whatever but yet to see any social bookmark creep up to the front page of my listings while ive seen directories take as high as 2nd and 3rd place in my own rankings so... When your site is ready: * Have other relevant sites link to yours. * Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html. * Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google webmaster tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages. * Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online. * Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites. Ummm did the webmasters guild lines say anything about submit your site to Digg and Del.io.cus and other industry specific? Nooooo i didnt think so It was a nice try but not an accurate one.. thx malcolm
Great points! Thanks for sharing, good to see Loren 'hired' Jeff to do the posts about web directories.. And then the question as stated by Ramanean, which directory has more traffic, alive or aviva? Then again that's not really a question, both the two of the best web directories on the internet Hope to see more posts at searchenginejournal about web directories.. They have great articles, I still remember the dirspace article
There are a lot of junk directories out there - both free and paid. Backlinks, PR, PS, etc. are nice, but doesn't mean much to me if there is no editorial control (listings with duplicate - keyword only - titles, marketing hype for descriptions, etc.), poor category structure or sites placed in wrong categories. I want my listings to be associated with other sites in my niches.
I'd never heard of Relmax Top before, so it's surprising to find it up there in that list of directories with lots of backlinks.