Nov 07 2006
Is Site Submission to Directories Useful?
By Gabe
Some pontificate that Directory Submission is a Waste of Time
In the beginning there was the trading of reciprical links. Then Google found them and began ignoring reciprical links. After that wikis and blogs popped up and damaging SPAM forced wide spread use of the NoFollow tag.
After reciprical linking came direcotries of websites. Currently some state that directories are ignored by Google too and that we get nothing for the time and effort we put into submitting to hundreds of directories.
I’ve submitted 2 sites to web directories. This doesn’t make me a pro but my experience has been basically good. (In case you are interested I use Directory Submitter.)
My Directory Submission Experiences
I run a very technical engineering wiki in a narrow niche. As a result I was being mostly ignored by Google in favor of Wikipedia. Then I submitted my website to approximately 350 web directories over the course of a few days (10 minutes here, 10 minutes there until it was complete).
After submitting my site to the directories my page rank didn’t change but my website was getting crawled much more often. As a result my new articles were included in Google’s search results in a few days.
Shortly many of my pages were showing up in the top ten of the “long tail keywords”. My site’s subject matter is Control Theory and the top ten search returns for that keyword are owned by Wikipedia, IEEE, and universities. There is little chance that I will ever remove them from their high ranking spots for that main keyword. However, there are specific design fields (those “long tail keywords”) where the top sites have less presence allowing me to rank high. It wasn’t until a few weeks after I completed directory submissions until I received those high ranking slots. Often with articles that had resided on my site for months.
Conversely I began a Usenet portal this last fall and almost immediately started submitting the portal to directories. This has not been effective. But, the portal is a portal to Usenet postings and probably suffers from duplicate content penalties.
Popular Sites Do Not Need to Submit; Young Ones Do
Obviously, if you maintain a well travelled site having a PR above 4 then you don’t need to put out the effort for directory submission. But, if your website is young or requiring inbound, one-way, links then directories still benefit you. Submission to the web directories is free, software is available to significantly decrease the required time, and the links are (mostly) permenant.
My hubpages on this topic
http://hubpages.com/hub/Is-Directory-Submission-Worth-the-Effort
http://hubpages.com/hub/Submission-to-Directories-Gets-You-Hundreds-Of-Good-DoFollow-Links
My blog on directory submission
http://freebies.controltheorypro.com/92/free-website-directory-submitter/
