I just "hand submitted" my website to about 50 directories and it took me a pretty long time. I honestly don't see how anyone could "hand-submit" your website to 500-2000 directories for prices of around $50-$100 without the usage of software. Is there some kind of secret to doing this more quickly or are most of these people lying just to get your business?
I have always assumed that the companies that claim to manually submit your website to directories are able to do so because they are using multiple people which can significantly speed up the process.
We do alot of directories submissions and we never advertise as being manual. We browse to dir, choose category and the information is auto filled by a browser plugin, we then enter the captcha if any and press submit. Can we call it semi-manual. But you are right, it is a tedious work.
I 100% agree with you. I also wonder how most of dir submitters are that cheap. I also do dir submissions by @ $20 per 100 submissions, which I guess is I deserve.
I'm skeptical about the "hand submission" but I couldn't say as I've never tried one of these services. Maybe directories get you some links...maybe....but they've never given me any traffic.
Think about it, is it economical for the person to be manually submitting a site to 2000 directories for $50? At that rate it is impossible to make a living. More than likely the submissions are automated, or they just aren't submitting to that many sites.
If you have 10 people working on the job how are you supped to earn any money? Even with 10 people it would take them AT LEAST one or two hours each to submit to 500 directories if they did 50 a piece. Most services charge about $40 or $50 to do that many which means that each person would get less than $5. Highly unlikely that's how they do it. Many of the people who offer these services live in the U.S. or U.K. where the American dollar isn't that great.
@Greg: You have a point. Most of the manual directory submitters come from third world country where $100 per month would not be a BAD salary You might have seen $350-$450 per month advertisement for a 'full time' seo assistant. I would say that some of them might actually be using a software and in that case they may not be able to submit to directories running handcoded scripts and other non conventional scripts like http://www.canlinks.net/. Don't be surprised if people can submit to 1000 directories for $30-40. One can easily make 200-300 submissions manually in 8 hours. But 1000 submissions in a day definitely looks suspicious (even with form-fillers) Just my 2 cents..
Well we are the cheapest then , we do 100 submission for just $15, now anyone can say if we belong to third world or the value of $ is good for us. and we even dont have a big team, but we work in long hours and never use a automatic software, yes we do it through firefox, open a few directories together and it helps a little , but everything manual.
Same here: Yes all comany advertising "Manual Directory submission" are doing it Manual or as mentioned here Semi-auto. and it's great as Google hate "auto submission". welcome
I do manual directory submissions for my sites. I prefer to do it myself than outsource it because I want it to be done well. Quality directory submission service would costs around $20 for 100 directories I think.