One question in looking at Search Engine Optimization strategies is whether or not directory listings and shopping directories should be considered as part of your strategy. Let’s talk about this.
Shouldn’t I be in hundreds or thousands of these Listings?
You hear it quite often that each link is a vote for your site; However, be aware that a link in a thousand directory listings does not mean a thousand votes for your site. There are many services out there that you can pay and they will automatically submit your site to hundreds or thousands of directory listings. I recommend that you not use them. I have seen first hand and read on various discussion forums how these services have damaged sites resulting in harsh penalties on the placement of the Google search engine results - penalties not easily remedied. I have also read in various discussion forums of people signing up for these services then seeing their site immediately either banned or heavily penalized on Google. Furthermore, these automated services arguably go against Google Terms and Conditions and the spirit of what Google wants which is that they do not want people to pay for search engine placement. They instead want the world to recognize your site naturally and then they will push your site up front. Google has gotten pretty good at detecting these schemes and will not allow these schemes to help you.
So should you deal with these directories at all in your strategy? Yes.
Directory Listings
One general guideline is that a good directory listing does not accept all applicants. A good directory listing screens each site for quality and only accepts the site if it is a quality site. These directory listings should be turning down about 25% of the applicants. If they are not following this approximate rejection rate rule, then their directory will become too spammy to be useful and their effect on the search engine placement will be meaningless. Since these sites must screen your site prior to listing it, good directory listings require a fee to pay the reviewers for their time. This fee may range from less then $10 all the way up to $299 for the Yahoo directory listing. I recommend that you do both a Google search for directory listings and a Yahoo search for directory listings. Find those directory listing which place well and submit your site to several of these.
Another factor to consider is that some directory listings have page rank on the actual listing page of your site as opposed to only having page rank on the home page. Look for sites that give you legitimate PR strength on the page your site will be on without lots of outgoing links to counter the strength. You won’t find a whole lot of these; however, when you find them, give them priority.
Shopping Directories
What differentiates shopping directories from directory listings are two things.
1. Most will not give you link love. They will instead list your site with an internal redirect that will end up taking the user to your site. As a result, these shopping directories will not help your organic search engine placement.
2. People actually use some of these directories to go shopping. Three examples are shopinusa.com, Yahoo Shopping and Shopzilla.
If you have a site with good potential for income, then making use of these shopping directories may very well be worth the fees. Shopinusa.com is a free directory with a premium service available if you choose to pay for it.
Targeting Phrases
Through the learning process, I also determined that the directory listings can play a factor in long tail search phrases. As you are building these listings, do what you can to name the link to your site using some of your targeted keyword phrases; however, some of the directory listings will not allow you to do this. Do the same in your blog entries. Mix up the text of the links to be text likely entered by search engine users. This will greatly improve your search results on the less competitive phrases without hurting you on the competitive phrases.
Case Study
I made the new version of tirechaindealer.com available early in July. Quickly after it being indexed by Google, it showed up on Page 26 for the search term of “tire chains”. This was already a significant improvement over the original url of www.tire-chain-dealer.com. www.tire-chain-dealer.com was a site that had previously used one of those submission services. After using the submission service, I felt that I had lost control of my search engine optimization strategy with the site doing well on some long-tail searches but horribly on the important search term. In July, www.tire-chain-dealer.com showed up on page 36 for the same search term of “tire chains”. I made certain I was using unique content on the new domain name of tirechaindealer.com.
During the first 20 days of the new site, I used the following strategy.
1. I added You Tube movies with links to the site.
2. I signed up for a handful of free directory listings.
3. I modified some of the incoming links to the original site changing the url to the new domain name.
YouTube had some benefits in that it not only gave me incoming links from YouTube itself, there are other websites that feed movies in from YouTube and may result in incoming links independently. My posting to YouTube was done the same time I made the site available and was already a contributing factor at getting me to page 26.
On July 31, I was on page 18.
During August, we made some significant progress - couple of steps forward, a step back, and a couple more steps forward. Instead of targeting free directory listings, I paid for about 8 paid for listings. I also added entries into about 6 automotive blogs and found a handful of other miscellaneous links in unrelated SEO forums. I was quickly seeing progress as the listings resulted in the site moving up to page 15. I added a link into the highly respected Edmunds.com and I immediately jumped up to page 12. I soon received an email from the webmaster telling me that he was removing my posting as being solicitation. I immediately dropped back to page 15.
About this time, I was getting frustrated about Google not finding my new links in the directory listings, so I added a helpful reference in my tire chain discussion forum with a list of all of the links to my site that were in the directory listings—in other words, I added reciprocal links to the directory listings. I added the same reciprocal links in this blog creating a three way reciprocal link effect. It seemed that Google did not like that very much at all. All of a sudden, my tire chain site dropped back three pages. Hits on my blog immediately dropped about 30% as well. I quickly removed those recipricol links concluding that I must have hit a penalty. I don’t really care what anybody else’s opinion is about reciprocal links. I don’t believe that Google likes them anymore unless they are naturally occurring. In fact, I believe that Google will penalize you for them if they have any type of appearance of manipulating the search engine. I base this statement on interviews of Matt Cutts, the follow-on opinion of Eric Enge in answering a question I posted on his blog following his interview of Matt Cutts, and my own personal experience with reciprocal links. Focusing on reciprocal links is old school and will no longer help you-and it may hurt you.
The new links from the directory listings did eventually kick in and I moved back up from page 18 to page 15 and got stuck there for about three weeks.
On August 15, I did the 301 redirect of the old site to the new site which you can read about in the previous blog entry. On August 25, the redirect kicked in place and I moved to page 13.
On August 31, I moved up to page 10. My only explanation for the sudden increase from page 13 to page 10 was that the penalty that I had incurred three weeks earlier from reciprocal linking must have outplayed itself and now the penalty was removed.
As I look at the Google analytics, of all of the directory listings, none of them are driving traffic to my site. I do believe that they are a significant factor in increasing the strength in the Google results. The shopping directories; however, are driving traffic to the site. I am also getting significant traffic from long tail search results in Google.
I am almost done with using directory listings in my SEO strategy for this site. All that are left are the Yahoo Directory and DMOZ - the two directories highly recommended by Google. Late last week, I gave Yahoo my $299. I am not yet included in the directory. I applied for DMOZ in July over six weeks ago. The thing about DMOZ is that you have no control as to if or when you will be accepted into this directory. I just keep my fingers crossed every day hoping for inclusion. But I am not holding my breath.
I would like to see exactly what the inclusion in the Yahoo Directory will do for the placement. Unfortunately, the September strategy may prevent us from seeing its results without other factors coming into play.
The strategy for the month of September is to use press releases and the addition of new unique content plus the inclusion into the Yahoo directory already mentioned. My goal is to be on Page 1 by the end of the month. Let’s see if we find success at this task. I would say that going from page 26 on July 10 to page 10 on August 31 is a pretty significant jump.
Conclusion
My conclusion is that directory listings when done in moderation can play a significant role in your search engine optimization strategy. They will help you. However, they will not get you to page one for competitive keyword search terms. Also, when overdone, they may hurt you. It is however, a perfect beginning at giving your site legitimacy and strength in the search engines.