Hi all, I'm a frustrated webmaster. I have a few new sites whose traffic I am desperately trying to grow. A couple of them were seeing 30-40 unique visitors per day and I wanted to grow these by the end of the year to have 100-150 organic hits per day. So, I decided to submit them to new directories that I found on the DP forums. After adding them to the directories, I noticed that my SERP went down and, obviously, so did the traffic I was once getting. What's up w/ that? The domains are both over a year old and so were the sites. Does G now frown upon directories or do sites do a dance in the SERP after links are added? Thanks!
Do your directory submission titles include the keyword(s) you wish to rank for? Are you changing your submission sets (title, description, name, etc.)? How many directories have you submitted to? In most cases the drop is just temporary, taking a few days or week to bounce back. Without knowing the URL, keywords you are trying to rank for, and number of directories submitted to, we can't be more specific in addressing your problem. But in most cases, links pointing to your site can never hurt you...
The drop is almost definitely temporary unless you were just submitting to a ton of link farms. I wouldn't worry, google fluxuates constantly.
Thanks everyone- My mind is a little more at ease I have submitted the same title keywords and roughly the same descriptions to about 30 or 40 directories in the past 3 weeks. I now see these directories ranking higher than me for the keyword that I am targeting! Thanks again!