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Directory Submission still alive for gaining organic SEO results?

Google recently removed one of the guidelines from their webmaster help center section saying “Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites”. However, I still keep hearing hawks about huge directory submission packages from numerous SEO companies around the globe. Not only these SEO companies are advocating the directory submission, but also they are spending substantial amount of money in advertising their directory submission services. Being in SEO consultancy since last 5 years, I sometimes get astonished when some SEO consultants speak in favor of directory submission while Google explicitly removed this technique of achieving organic SEO rankings from their guidelines. So being the one who strongly recommends adhering Google guidelines and believe in only white hat SEO techniques, directory submission hawks bug me! If I hear such offers from a newbie, who’s not well aware of SEO techniques and has not worked out especially high competitive keywords, I may just pass a smile. But the source of confusion is that why the companies who claim to be experts in SEO and have numerous satisfied clients in their portfolio are offering this so called “non-sense” service? Does this mean that SEO companies are just fooling the businesses and are taking advantage of ignorance about SEO? OR, is it true that directory submission is still alive and works as it used to be?

Directory Submission still alive?

Google still suggests submitting websites to paid directories like yahoo and some others. But a common sense question is that a directory is a directory after all! Is there any difference if the same information is posted on my website just as on yahoo directory? What makes Google think that having a back link from yahoo is good but from some other directory is useless and unlawful? The purpose behind directory submission is to just get one way back links that Google highly recommends and that’s what directory submission accomplishes. Digging deep into investigating the issue with directory submission, many sub branches open up and each of them needs to be researched to find the actual conclusion. One interesting phenomenon is that search engines like back links from websites bearing relevant content and while you’re submitting your website to directories, of course you strive to place your link within the right category where some of your competitors are also linked. Most of the directories allow you submit your link title, description and the actual URL. So if a page in a directory contains 30 links and all the site links are relevant to each other, doesn’t it make sense that each webmaster might have typed link description and title that is very relevant to their industry and yours too? Imagine, 30 chunks of content that are relevant to your website theme are there on the page along with your site description, title and link. Doesn’t this make page a relevant page? Shouldn’t this page buy some value for your website from Google and other search engines? Apparently sounds sensible and it should. Then why Google and other search engines discourage the directory submission? There are many other factors that prove that directory submission in the right category should give value to your link and must play valuable role in giving your site better PR. Little further branches of this investigation process lead me to think that may be we’re misusing directory submission? I know I spoke about directory submission and discouraged this practice in one of my previous articles about link building. However, further studies and experiments prove that directory submission is not the source of problem. Actually, we’re using directories wrongly! Yes!!! I mean it. Let me try explaining why and how.

Correct use of Directory Submission

Normally when we start submitting a website to numerous directories, what we do in the start is that we create only one page title and one site description, then submit it to hundreds of directories and resource sites. This practice is observed in 99% of directory submission service providers. Let’s say that your website was submitted to 100 directories. Now imagine, same title, same description and same URL is placed on 100 websites. Search engines like unique contents, so doesn’t it mean like spam for search engines? That’s the hick and this where directory submission sucks!!! Automation and ease is always a demand of human nature, one can understand that finding and submitting to hundreds of directories is a hectic job and business owners always intend to find some automated programs that submit their websites to thousands of directories just in minutes. This is good as far time consumption and cost effectiveness is concerned. But you actually completely lose the outcome of your directory submission efforts if you do it through automated process. Automated programs ask your site credentials only for once and then blast to tons of directories. That makes it spam for search engines. So the best practice in directory submission process is to first short list the directories ensuring that they have enough amount of relevant links already placed in your targeted category and search engines have easy access to those pages. Then for each directory, have unique link title and description and then manually submit your website to each directory.

To cut short, automated directory submission is something like poison for achieving your organic SEO goals. However, manual directory submission ensuring unique descriptions and titles on each directory must be helpful in getting better PR. Even if you have outsourced your link building and directory submission part of SEO, be sure that they use unique titles and descriptions on each link they create for you through directory submission.

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1. Link Building
2. Building One Way Back Links
3. Top Google Ranking and SEO
4. SEO Process – Search Engine Optimization for Newbies
5. Website Designing