~Issue Number Two~
April 29, 2011 [Next Issue: May 6, 2011]
Hello Friend,
Due to the many changes in the search environment, some things that worked yesterday are no longer working when it comes to SEO.
Directories are old school when it comes to the Internet, and there's been some questions about them. Are they still valid? Should you bother? What directories are good/bad or don't matter?
If you've been wondering... We've got some thoughts...
Lee Collins
Managing Director
StomperNet, LLC
"The five essential entrepreneurial skills for success are concentration, discrimination, organization, innovation and communication."
- Michael Faraday
Are Link Directories Still Relevant or
a Total Waste of Time and Resources?
When the Internet was still fairly new, the best known site for typing keywords that applied to what you were looking for was Yahoo.com. It was organized into different categories, and you could either pick a category that you were interested in learning more about or type a search term in to find different category listings.
Though it had a search element, Yahoo didn't move to crawler-based results until around 2002. Before that, it was most definitely more directory than search engine.
That was in the mid-90s and since the inception of Yahoo, many other directories have popped up on the Web, both good and bad.
Five years ago, it was cool to add your link to any directory that existed. All backlinks -- free or paid -- were good links, and no matter where they came from, they boosted your place in the SERPs.
Fast forward to 2011, and things have changed. Though Yahoo is still a well-respected force online, and Google isn't the ONE big dog that it used to be, it's still making heavy ripples throughout the Web -- when something happens there, everyone still pays attention.
With recent changes, we have reason to wonder -- are link directories so yesterday, or do they even matter?
Google did one thing with the recent Panda update, and that was to make low-quality, poor content sites targets for devaluation.
But even some of the big dogs were howling.
We saw respected sites like Ezine Articles, Mahalo, and HubPages suffering severe ranking and traffic damage. And we know that the issues that these sites faced was the duplicate content issue.
But other sites, which Google considers to be "low-quality," suffered from lack of content of any kind -- the scrapers, the squeeze pages (which never really ranked anyway), and maybe... online link directories?
How are they stacking up?
You'd think that since they have little content, aside from site descriptions, that they might have been impacted negatively. For some of them, that's true, but for others, their traffic actually increased dramatically. Panda loved them! Check out these stats, recently gathered from SEMRush.com:
Apparently, Google found value in some directories and not in others. The traffic differences before and after were astounding!
Notice that its own DMOZ.org dropped almost 300,000 visitors after Panda, whereas Yahoo improved by more than 45.5 million! Other directories fared in differing amounts of traffic, up and down, across the board.
But the shakeout is not over. In April, Business.com dropped like a stone to around 99K visitors, a mere 1/10 of the traffic the site was getting.
So, what happened?
We can only guess. However, directories returning lots of 404 links would definitely not be viewed favorably. Sites offering sitewide linking was another consideration, which has always been something Google frowned upon, even when buying links hadn't been demonized by the search giant a few years ago..
It's easy to sit back and make assumptions, but the fact is that directories that improved in traffic are the type you'll want to target if part of your SEO strategy is to include them in your backlinking process. But if you're just going for potential traffic, remember that things have changed. Entering your site could be a total waste of time these days.
So, how do you decide whether to bother at all, and if you do want to add your site to any of the online directories, what criteria should you follow before shelling out any amount of cash?
Here are three tips for making sure your one-way backlink is valuable:
1. Find only human-edited directories.
If the directory is a paid option and says that sites are reviewed, be sure that the sites it has registered are quality sites and that they really are looking for sites with great content to improve the Web. Also check their refund policy if your site is rejected. Some of them do refund partial or entire fees paid.
2. Make sure that there aren't too many ads running on the site.
If there are, it's a sure bet that if it hasn't happened already, the site will lose impact over time.
3. Can you find a category that is 100% relevant to your site?
Make sure that a local directory listing category is in line your niche, too. Don't just submit to be included without evaluating the value of doing so first.
Gaining one-way links from quality directories is still a great start-up strategy for getting a new site going. Solid directory backlinks are still valued by all of the search engines and are a good basis to build upon.
However, if you don't continue to gather backlinks for a page, the effect will decrease over time, so if you're in it for the long haul, create a system to keep the backlinks flowing.
StomperNet has trained thousands of webmasters to generate free, organic traffic on-demand with solid SEO principles. Find out how you can get your fair share of free traffic right away by clicking below...
Now that you know how directories can still be beneficial, here are some tips about what NOT to do when considering your options:
1. Do not use the same anchor text in every directory link. Make things look more natural, as if other people are recommending or "voting" for your site.
2. Remember that Yahoo or DMOZ can be worth 20 of the lower echelon links combined.
3. This backlinking strategy tends to work best with Yahoo and Bing in terms of it having a SERPs impact, but you can still get directory traffic from Google if your site is listed in a highly visible directory.
4. Regularly updated and respected blogs in your niche will tend to drive more traffic, if that's what you're looking for, so guest posting would be a better way to go than paying for a $300 listing that has minimal traffic itself. Check Alexa rankings and other indicators of overall site traffic to find out.
5. Most directories online are nothing more than link spam. Be very careful about the directories you choose. Just because a site is free and seems like a good deal doesn't mean that it won't hurt your SEO more than help.
How do you plan to leverage these tips to improve your ranking?
" "We looked at where our business is now, and where it would have been without StomperNet, and absolutely... StomperNet has paid off for our business... We probably wouldn't even have the business if it wasn't for StomperNet." - Steve Wylie Remember: Next Stomper SEO Intelligence Report:
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