This was brought up on another thread but I didnt want to take the thread over so heres my rant. The question is does submitting your site to 200 directories in one day hurt you? My answer is not a chance in hell. My reasoning. Picture this, you just submitted your site to 200 directories using roboform, lazyseo, or whatever your method. Lets use the best case scenario saying everyone of those directories approved your site on that same day! We all know that is far from the truth though. Now you have 200 fresh links on 200 different sites. Well according to the search engines you dont yet. They have no clue that they are there yet. So now you sit around waiting for them to get noticed by the search engines or cached. The search engines wont even know your link is there until that happpens. For arguments sake we will use a popular directory like Alive Web Directory. I spent a few minutes checking out how long ago the inner pages were cached and most of them were a few weeks even found some that havent been cached in around a month. Now remember this is a popular directory and it takes that long for the search engines to even recognize a new link on that site. Back to the point. If you submit your site to 200 directories with the time it takes for them to get approved (if they even do get approved) and the time it takes for the page to get cached there is no way this can hurt you at all. You would be lucky to get 1 of those cached a day and that is far from being penalized from link building too fast. Last story I read was about Nintendo who threw (i forget the correct number) but around 35,000 weight from the coop program to 1 site and ended up getting penalized. This is thousands of links compare to 200. Anyways I am interested in what you all think about this.
One thing to consider - I've seen a number of directories that are owned by the same person, just with a slightly different look. I am not sure if being listed on multiple sites owned by the same entity is a good idea - if he gets banned, I wouldn't want to have his site linking to mine. And I believe it could happen - if a search engine is doing a sweep to ban all his sites and sees that all of them link to yours, they might think that your site is part of his network and take you down too.
I think you have to distinguish between submitting to 200, and getting approved by 200 in one day. Has anyone ever had that kind of approval rate? So in reality, if you submit to that many you might get 20 links on the first day, 30 the next, 15 the week after that, 15 in the next month, and so on. Depending on what kind of site you have built, of course.
That will only happen if you put up reciprocal links to any or all of the directories, and even then it isn't certain. Just getting listed in such places won't do you any harm.
If I need to express my viewpoint, I will say no to mass links. i will go for few links here and there and few links on high quality websites. it works! Submission to directories i.e. Dmoz and country specific is good, despite low approval rate. It gives natural link to site owner. IMO
I have not experienced this myself but, have read loads of article about it. I would stay away from doing it.
I dont think that 200 submissions can do any harm - not even 500 ! But they will show results and throw in their weight only in the succeeding weeks. Patience is the MANTRA for SEO !!
Most of those links will be PR0 so if the site doesn't have other links, Truncated PageRank algorithm for detection of link manipulators will detect it as the site which use spam links.
never use mass link submission!! i tried it and got me email listed on some spam list and now i get about 400 emails a day about some stocks
I have websites that have done well almost entirely on free directory submissions. On each of these I hired someone to manually submit to 400 or 500 directories over a 3 day period. Then I myself immediately started to manually submit to 5 directories each day, and continued to do so for months. To my knowledge my sites have never been penalized, mocked or ostracized by the search engines. In fact as I monitored the back-links in MSN and YAHOO I could see back-links building at relatively slow pace. I believe there are enough bottlenecks with directory submissions (low pr, long queues, disapprovals, SE back-link processing, etc.) that I just don't see how it would be possible to get into trouble.
I got 300 links in month 1, 400 in month 2 and 300 more in month 3, overall the site 3+ months old now, MSN shows 1800+ BLs, Y! shows 700+ BLs. At one point I did get 200+ links at one shot but I didn't see them go online at once, and since most of the links are on PR0 pages, I am sure the crawling must also be done at different time periods, so no bans here.
I got on a spam list after using a submission service too. Never received Nigerian money scams and Viagra ads on that email address before. I would have used a dummy email, but the submission service used my Paypal email to submit... doh!
I don't think so that mass free directory submission will hurt as the links won't accepted immediately and also even if they do, than google won't crawl them immediately. But I want to know does mass article submission hurts ? because if you submit 10 articles to 5 big article directory than your articles(links) will more often than not, immediately gets online.
Find a new service. Aside from the spam I find you will get accepted into more directories if you use a dummy account. ie: Also some directory submitters will only submit your sites to directories with unique ips.
On a worse scenario, if you submit to 200 directories a day and everyone approved you, then you will eventually get 200 backlinks a day from the major search engines, that is only if you keep submitting to different sets of 200 directories a day for a year or so. This is because the old directories that you submitted to will end up getting cached where you link is with the new directories and stuff. I hope you understand what I am saying. But if you do 200 submissions a day for something like a month then it may not matter to much or just do it on and off.
Those mass link things a useless if you ask me. I believe they are a front just to collect the email. Then send you spam about webmaster related content.