I am submitting my site to lots of directories, but I am wondering if I will be able to see my results. My search rankings have been increasing gradually over time, but I never know which efforts have the most effect. In other words, if my search rankings jumped tomorrow, how would I know if it was from all my directory submissions I did in the past two days? Does anyone have knowledge of the timelines involved? I realize that many directories will take months to process, but I submitted to at least 10 paid directories today with page rank of 4-6, and they will probably show up within the next week or two.
Well first of all you need to understand the link building process . As per my experience the link that real matter is based on do follow, 60 - 40 links on the page and the quality of the web page you are creating it and of course the theme counts too.These link will help your ranking but you need to focus on quality links.
I like to use multiple checkers to get a better idea of how things perform at different search engines. For example, check out siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com for indexed links on your site, as well as incoming links (from other domains, or from your domains). There's also google.com/webmasters/tools that gives you more elaborate information on what links are recognized as pointing to yours. Don't expect a 1 for 1 link acquisition, link index. In the end you may only see 10% of your links (though more often higher) recognized.
Man, the ops post brought back head banging days of trying to track my backlinks. Eventually I decided tracking them was not worth my time. They could be there one day, gone the next and for me to daily track or try to figure out which links where giving me the most juice was time better spent on getting more links. Maybe you don't agree, but I would submit your links, move on to your next link project and in time your effort will pay off.
I agree with the post above. Definitely not worth trying to track backlinks, especially directory ones. Personally, i find a large majority of directories useless. There's only a few good ones, and surprise surprise they show up in Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster Tools.
Thanks everyone for your help. I understand what you are saying about not wasting time checking to track your backlinks. I agree. The reason I am doing it is to try and get an experiential learning of what kinds of results my efforts are having, in order to better understand how to proceed in my backlink building campaign. I fiigured if I knew how the backlinks I acquire are improving my search engine rankings, I could adjust my approach accordingly. For example for three days I have been adding my site to directories. But I have no idea if that is helping my seo or not.
What i do to get my backlinks indexed by google is, build a rss feed for the backlinks and ping it. and mines get indexed within hours.