I’m now passing the 10,000 submissions mark for directory submissions I’ve done. Let me tell you; I have seen a lot of these “seo friendly” directories: and many of them really aren’t what they state they are. If you advertise yourself as seo friendly, then by George you should maintain that with the way your directory works and functions. If there’s little or no benefit of being listed in your directory: why would anyone want to be?

Some common things that make a directory not seo friendly:

• Broken Pagination: If a user cannot correctly navigate throughout your website without running into 404 errors or 500 errors, then search engines can’t either.
• Poor Category Structure: If you have 700 websites listed under the “internet” category; yet the topics range from free banner advertising to dialup internet service – where is the relevancy? In my opinion, these “seo friendly directories” are simply glorified FFA pages.
• Nofollow Attribute: If you even want to consider your directory seo friendly, then this should be a curse word in your vocabulary. However, I am seeing more an more directories using this as a ploy to get people to pay exorbitant fees for their weakly ranked directories.
• Super restrictive submission guidelines: Understandably there must be rules and guidelines for submissions or every directory would look like they were running an ad farm. However, in my opinion, directories should give submitters some leeway during submission so that they can build their link popularity using relevant anchor text and descriptions. Every directory cannot be like dmoz, and shouldn’t be.

These are a few of the problems I’ve encountered with so called seo friendly directories; likely there are others that have other findings as well. Feel free to post your thoughts on this.

With the obvious out of the way – they would have to be general directories, free, not requiring a reciprocal link & not requiring registration, though that’s not a terrible issue.  Also – they must be search engine friendly, of course.  But what else?

A directory having a high pagerank is good, yes.  I think that the age of the domain could/should come into play as well.  But what about other factors?

I’ve read & seen, though not that often – directory submission lists touting different class c ip addresses.  Some time ago there was a post on the vn7.com blog about a couple of different websites – while one had significantly more backlinks, the website with more unique backlinks (though far less in total) outranked the first in the same keywords.  This, I believe, was also coupled with poor on page optimization for the site with more ip address unique backlinks.  Does this factor still make that much of a difference?  If it did – we should really see more directory submissions that offered unique class c ip address directories as an option. 

I’m sure there are other factors that should come into play as well.  As posted before in this blog, page strength might be a good tool for comprising a quality directory list for submission.

I’m by no means trying to reinvent the wheel as there are great, well maintained directory lists out there: It’s just – if there were a directory list – that almost guaranteed an immediate and significant jump in your website rankings, alongside steady increasing popularity for every website you submitted to this magical list -  why shouldn’t we try to improve on what’s already available?

I would really love input on this – as I, myself, am working on a couple of things for this “magical” directory list as I have time.  I’m not too far into it, but would love to hear what others think would give a directory list a real, and significant value – aside from what is readily available today.

 

The problem with “auto submission” software regarding directories is this: A script or program, at least at this point in time; cannot compete with good, old fashioned common sense. Beneficial directory submissions require about 5% physical work and 95% common sense application.

Where does the common sense come in?  Well – it’s in the category placement.  No matter how smart your submission script or program is, it can never compete with a human directory submitter that has a good grasp of the language (the language of the website being submitted and the language of the directory) and also has at least a decent dose of common sense.

The auto submission software cannot guage if one category is going to be more suitable over the other, and the auto submission software cannot tell if it is submitting to the completely wrong category.  Most directory owners are not in favor of this directory submission software simply because of the mis-categorization of websites, not to mention the very frequent placement of wrong data into the submission fields.  For instance, a semi-common occurrence with auto directory submission software is that the website owners name is submitted in the title field for the website.  This, of course, would not happen with hand submission with a competent submitter.

If you want to get the most out of directory submissions, simply say “no” to directory auto submission software.  You will more than get your moneys worth with a good directory list and a competent human submitter.

That’s just my 2 cents, anyway.

 

I’m going to go into what some of the common, standard beliefs are as well as a little bit of my own thoughts regarding these “SEO Friendly” directories.

A SEO friendly directory should:

• Provide a static, one way link back to the original website (no redirects, funky javascript, or cloaking going on)
• Use the anchor text that was input by the submitter of the website to the directory

In addition to this, a seo friendly directory should not employ the use of the rel=nofollow attribute to the submitted websites nor use meta tags or the robots.txt file to otherwise hinder the crawling of links by search engine robots for submitted websites to these directories.

My own personal flair: when I am submitting a personal website to a directory I tend to look at the overall quality of the directory.  At least quality in my opinion.

• Do they accept submissions from junk websites?
• Do they keep related websites grouped together, or do they dump a bunch of non-related links together?

Something that makes me consider a directory as not search engine friendly are the two questions above.  If I visit a directory and I see a link for a made for adsense pharmacy website in the same category as a webmaster forum: I immediately know that this is not the type of directory where I want my website endorsed.  This is a personal decision, and may not reflect the people that think along the lines of “it’s about quantity of backlinks, not quality”.  To me, these “directories” are not much different than a FFA pages, and hold very little value for the search engine optimization process. 

Undoubtedly others will feel different about this, and I’d love to hear some opinions about it.

“Why should I submit my website to directories?”

While others may have their own ideas as to exactly what these submission do and how important they are, here are a couple of benefits explicitly derived from getting a static, one way link to your website from a high ranking web directory.

1. Search engine robots love high ranking directories.  These robots visit high ranking directories frequently and actively follow the links placed within them. Namely; your website.  The benefit here: your website will get crawled, or visited, by search engine robots quickly.  This is probably one of the biggest benefits to directory submissions, in my opinion anyway.  You’re getting fast exposure for your website to the major search engines; something that will not happen with manual submission of your website directly to search engines themselves.

2. You’re building Page Rank with these directory submissions.  While the true value of Page Rank lies in the eyes of the beholder, in the right hands a high Page Rank website wields a great deal of power, and it is considered by many to be a sign of authority.  Having a high Page Rank website also helps you to charge a nice amount of cash if you’re willing to sell link space. . . and that doesn’t hurt, either.

This list of benefits is by no means exhaustive, but does give a simple introduction for those that question exactly what the benefits of directory submissions are. 

For those of you that know of more benefits, feel free to share them here.

Submission rules

1. You must be Digital Point forums member to submit your profile.

2. Submit link to your member profile on Digital Point forums only. Example: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/member.php?u=xxxxx

3. Submit your profile to category of your expertise. That way you will get customers that need your service.

4. Describe your services or say few words about yourself.

5. Do not use selfpromtional terms in your services description. Example: best designer, most affordable etc.  

Here is the link to this directory of digital point members.