Hi fiends. Please suggest me what can be the advantages and disadvantages of submitting sites in various directories? How come directory submission helps in improving PR? Thanks kewllllyyy
Directory submission will improve your PR because your link will be placed on some PR1-2-3-4 or higher page. Depending on the directory you can even get some traffic.
In my experience the best links are from other websites in your niche, if you can get them. If other webmasters inyour niche aren't cooperative, create more websites in that niche!
The backlinks are nice, and will help the big G find your site and get you ranked. Be prepared to get some spam at the email address you use to submit your sites. After this last site submission I had a nice guy from the Congo telling me he had millions as an inheritance, but needed some money up front to get to it. I paid $30 for a directory submission one time and will not do that again. It was submitted to the wrong categories and I only ended up with one link. For almost that same price you can buy directory submission software which will semi-automate the whole process for you and will let you see if the directory is of quality before you submit to it. It (the software) is a one time fee that you will easily make back as you make more websites.
pros: increase PR, Backlinks cons: cost time, money better to let sit advertise in itself and people make a link to your site by themselves.
Directory submission really doesn't help very much in terms of getting a site to rank highly. I certainly wouldn't recommend submitting to more than about 10 for a new site and maybe 100 for an old (over 2 years) site.
Why is it a bad idea to submit new sites to more than 10 directories? Even if the new site is accpeted, and it isn't always, inclusion in some directories can take months after submitting. The backlinks are not created instantly, for the most part, so in my opinion, the inclusion into directories should appear natural even to search engines. I agree that directory submission may not help and to some may therefore seem like a waste of time, but if you have the time, I think it's not a bad idea. It helps you get started.
A lot of directories are very low quality and are most certainly not counted as natural links by Google. I would always try to stick to natural links for the first year.