Are Directory Submissions Still Effective

By Yasir Y Khan

Directory submissions seem to be one of the main ways of building link popularity used by many SEO companies out there. When you pay for a directory submission service, your SEO company submits your URL to 400 or 500 (sometimes 1000) directories out there on the web. SEO companies claim that directory submissions is one of the fastest ways of improving link popularity.

While directory submissions help with your link popularity, the submissions do absolutely nothing as far as increasing the rankings are concerned. There are some websites with only 200 links which are ranking higher than websites with over 3000 links. The reason for the difference in rankings is because one website has trusted inbound links which the other does not.

The first reason why directory submissions pass minimal to no link juice is because they contain only links and no content. And for that reason, most of them have another fancy name: link farm. Because of the lack of content, search engines stop favoring web directories and make sure that their outgoing links do not pass a lot of value.

Another reason for the minimal benefit that directories provide is the fact that everyone submits their junk content to them. It is also not hard to imagine each category of a directory to have over 200 outbound links, which severely limits the amount of link juice these directories provide. Also, because directories connect to bad neighborhoods due to spammy links, they lose quality and have to pay a price by getting even more junky links.

Directories also do not provide any traffic to their listed websites because no one uses directories as a reference system like they were used in old times. People normally go to search engines like Google to find any stuff that they want. Even though many SEO “specialists” still think of directories as major source of navigation, that is not the case with directories any more.

However, there are a few high quality and high PR directories out there i.e. Yahoo Directory, Business.com, JoeAnt and DMOZ, which can provide your website with a lot of link juice. The downside for submissions to such directories is that they charge a hefty fee.

In conclusion, my advice to you is to stay away from directory submissions because they can actually hurt (rather than help) your websites.

About the Author:

Directory submissions are ineffective in a major way! Use our high pr inner page link building service to boost your search engine rankings. Also, check out our array of web marketing services.