I have a quick question: To have my whole site get index in the SERP, is it better to submit your sitemap or you index page/homepage to a directory? same question, what if you were to ping your site? Goal is to get index fast and get as many backlinks as possible Thanks in advance
If you have the homepage already indexed and you have properly done your website internal linking scheme the whole site will be indexed once the spider crawls your homepage and than follows the links. in any case, if you are going to submit to directories, than submit those pages that you want to rank higher in the serps and use the anchor text for which you want to rank.
Sorry here's some info on my site... Basically I just picked up an expired PR2 site...no page are index in SERP. Started a blog on it, trying to build backlinks and indexed
Your question is a bit weird. It's like asking "In order to survive in the wild, is it better to be a good hunter or to have a mouth that opens?" Getting your entire spidered (and actually ranking....which seam to go hand in hand in this case) is like getting a running start to make it to the top of the hill. The more links you have pointing to your site, the greater your chances of getting your deep links spidered and ranking. Assuming you are using a search engine friendly sytem on your site, there isn't much need to talk about spiderability. (If you don't have an SEO friendly site, we need to talk). You should ONLY be thinking about getting quality votes (links) to your site. The real answer to your question is both. It's dumb NOT to have a sitemap, and it's dumb not to get quality votes to your site. However, I can't guarantee you that the directory link you mentioned will be anywhere near quality. Brandon Brandon
by submitting my site to a directory, down to the tightest niche, will that be considered a quality vote link to my site? ex: Science -> Environment -> Environmental Health
In most cases, that would be considered a decent vote. There are exceptions. I like to run a backlink check on the other sites in that category to make sure that the other sites on the page detect this page as a backlink. I like to know the PR of that specific page. I like to know the # of outbounds. I'd prefer a site that specialized in science of a site like somedirectory.com. I'd prefer a directory that actually rejected some sites and therefor had some sort of non-SEO benefit. There is a start. Brandon
Submit sitemap. Submit to directories. The more backlink you have, the more the spider will crawl your site. And like said, if your internal linking is good, spider will crawl all your subpages from index pages.
Ah submit sitemaps....i think i get it now... when you submit your sitemaps to the dir, and the SE comes crawling they'll pick up everypage on your site because you submitted the sitemap, that's if your sitemap is inter-linking properly... another question...like i said earlier... if I submitted to Science > Environment > Environmental Health and this Environmental Health page where my link was submitted has a PR0, that doesn't do me any good (PR-wise) or those the main dir PR carries over to my site (ex: Science.com - PR6) Thanks in advance
While not giving you many PR juice, the PR0 page might get PR3 next time. Also, even if page is PR0, it will count as a backlink. Main page will probably not give you any PR juice.