Directories and social book marks ? whats the main differnece ?

Directories and social book marks ? in both we can save our sites

whats the main difference then ? i am new to these diretory services.

why directories are is getting more love and paid versions

thanks
chandan

 

Directories may provide very less traffic ( mostly none) but social bookmarking can provide huge traffic for a day or two

 

Oh ic thanks

 

if you are bookmarking your own sites,

-you can submit as many pages as you want to SB sites. (don't submit all in 1 day....else you will get banned).
-you control the anchor text...it can be anything.
-traffic is better.

 

I favour bookmarking sites more than directories.

 

First the disclaimer, I own two niche directories and I have participated on 4 different social networking sites. I have had two articles go to the front page of Digg and several that do well on Stumble. I still get traffic here and there for them but very few, if any actually convert. I continue to submit my sites to directories and social networking sites.

That said, my biggest issue with the bookmarking sites is that anyone can say their site is about anything. Many of the titles/linked text are blatant attempts to rank for keywords that have absolutely nothing to do with the page being linked to or the site overall. (Good directories do not allow that.)

I also don't see anything special about someone posting a link to a news outlet. I never understand why a story from Yahoo!, MSN, or one of the major newspapers is worthy of a social bookmark, much less going hot. Now if the link were to someone's site discussing that story, then I might be interested. If I wanted a news aggregator, I'll go and find one.

Stuff is entered into the wrong categories, sometimes by accident of it being the default category other times on purpose. (There's too many directories that do this as well but the well-run ones do not.)

Much of the stuff submitted is incomprehensible garbage and includes some of that terrible machine-generated, I'm not really stealing content because I've jumbled yours all up, content. Even that crap seems to get thumbs-up from members. (Any directory owner who visits a site like that is unlikely to accept it.)

I've also noticed quite a few times where my submission has gotten a number of votes but not an equal amount of traffic. One of the most popular items on one of the smaller bookmarking sites I use encouraged other users to participate in "if you vote for mine, I'll vote for your's" without bothering to even visit the source.

I do see the biggest benefit of social bookmarking sites as getting a link to interior pages where you do have some control over the linked text. There are times when you can get thousands of visitors and a nice number of backlinks but your post has to go hot for that to happen.

Many social links are no-follow and are not direct links. While some directories are changing to no-follow most do offer direct links.

I see a directory as providing a much more topical link that has been audited for quality. It's rare to find a link to a site with that unreadable and obviously massaged content. And while directories only allow for a handful of links to any given site, they can and do bring targeted traffic that converts well.

As far as a link-building strategy, I think both have merit and both can provide traffic and SEO benefits. I may be biased but I think directories by their nature hold truer to topic and require sites to have some level of quality before being included. The long term search engine benefits of well-run directories have been proven time and again.

Social bookmarking is more like a huge party full of people shouting to be heard all with the hopes of getting the crowd's attention and convince them to come to their house instead. Shout loud enough, say something new and different, or insult someone and you'll get their attention. Otherwise you just get trampled by the herd as they head off to read the latest "news" about Brittany Spears.

 

What are the articles YMC I'd like to read them. P.M, them if you don't want to broadcast them. Would that be okay?

 

sachin thanks for the suggestions

YMC thanks a lot for your detailed reply

+rep added

 

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