All webmasters should be familiar with the Google Webmaster Guidelines. As webpronews points out, the Google Webmaster Guidelines use to state the following.

- Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

This statement has now been removed.

So much uproar had been given to this one simple statement. DMOZ had become a coveted directory which became very difficult to get into. DMOZ even got its own discussion forum where webmaster after webmaster would vent about the corruption of DMOZ as the webmaster could not get their site listed. Frankly, nobody would have cared about DMOZ without that statement in the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Now that this statement is gone, I am sure the cries of anger will be soon gone as well. After all, how could there be corruption in a free service maintained by unpaid moderators who do not make their presence known. Furthermore, who really uses DMOZ to go shopping anyways? Do people that are listed in DMOZ get a significant amount of referral traffic from the site? Since I was never able to get my sites listed in DMOZ, I may never know.

The Yahoo Directory was the real one in question. You could pay Yahoo $299 and get listed - well, that is if they accept you. That is a nice chunk of change for one incoming link. The question is whether or not it is worth it.

For my Tire Chain website, I decided to give it a try. The webpage that holds the tire chain companies had a whole two companies listed. Now it has three companies listed since Tire Chain Dealer is now on the list. The page of the tire chain sites has a Page Rank of 1.

Here are the results.

1. The Yahoo Directory Listing made no know impact on my organic listings.
2. I recieved some solicitations during the first few days as some internet marketing companies use the “New Listings” section to find leads.
3. Since removal from the “New Listings” section, I have recieved no referral traffic for about 6 straight weeks from the directory - and I am in season for tire chain sales.

My conclusion is that the Yahoo directory is not worth $300. Instead, consider spending your $300 getting a good press release written.

I have read much about the so called Sandbox where new websites are prevented from ranking well in Google during its first few months in existence. It took 3.5 months for me to get tirechaindealer.com to rank reasonably. However, I still don’t know for certain if the 3.5 months was due to a sandbox effect (aging filter) or if that was simply how long it took for me to get the site to a standard which the Google algorithms finally accepted being a noteworthy site acceptable for page 2 of the highly competitive keyword phrase of “tire chains”.

During the first two months, I went from page 26 to page 10 and then back to page 15. You can read more about this in my post called Directory Listings And Shopping Directories/.

After this article, I encountered a drop from page 10 to page 15 that was explainable by changes in the text on the main page where I reduced the number of times the keyword phrase of “tire chains” was used in the text. I added a few more mentions of it and was able to recover back to page 10.

Another thing I did was I signed up with a marketing firm called Triangle Direct Media. They use an large network of bloggers to help websites to get backlinks using the blogsphere. After adding 25 new backlinks using this approach, I jumped up to page 9. Well, a one page jump is better than nothing; however, it is nothing to write home about. The vast majority of these backlinks (but not all of them) were low quality links – PR0 sites with lots of website reviews found therein.

During the next fifteen days, not much changed in terms of content or ranking.

Then during the following two weeks, I did the following.

1. I added a significant amount of new content by adding tractor tire chains and tire chains for graders, loaders, and scrapers. All of this new content made good use of a product landing page with links to the multiple catalog entries for each model. Each page in the catalog for each model then linked back to its landing page.

2. I added an improved page heading section to visibly better describe the site in plain text. I am not talking about the meta tags. I am referring to the top most section of the readable text within the page—you know, where you usually land a graphic with the name of the site. Except, instead of using a graphic, I used plain text with a descriptive tagline.

3. I had another round of bloggers add another 25 backlinks to the site—once again, mostly low quality links.

4. In the discussion forum at forum.tirechaindealer.com, I changed the default setting within the forum software to not convert outgoing URLs to html links but instead display them as plain text. Originally, I had about 100 outgoing links to weather and road condition pages to assist users with finding road condition information for their state. In this one move, 100 outgoing links were removed and replaced with plain text.

5. 3.5 months had elapsed from the time the site was made public and if the so-called aging filter where real, then it should be getting close to time to expire.

So after taking all these steps, I noticed the site get spidered on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and again on Thursday. Friday morning came around and the site jumped from page 9 to page 2.

So which of the five items caused the site to bust through the penalty filters and place it with the rest of the legitimate online tire chain companies? I don’t know that I will ever know for certain. Nevertheless, now I know where the real competition is. Spot 17 sure beats spot 95. Now I only have 14 more sites to surpass to make it into the top 3. Just give me a few more months and I will report back to you.

Today, I attended a seminar with Jive Software, and one of the educational items the speaker pointed out had to do with how to best organize the domain names. I will give the example here of my Tire Chain site.

Which is better?

Option 1: http://tirechaindealer.com/forum

Option 2: http://forum.tirechaindealer.com

My previous belief was that they were exactly the same. My belief was based on my experience that when you go to Google and type site:tirechaindealer.com into the search bar, you will get back all of the pages, both from option 1 and option 2. The tire chain site has http://tirechaindealer.com/catalog and http://forum.tirechaindealer.com. Since all pages come up, I simply assumed that the structure of the domain name was irrelevent.

However, according to the experts at Jive Software, thier experience has found that Option 2 gives your base url no credit for its content. Option 1 gives your base url full credit for its content. Therefore, you should always use Option 1 unless your hardware requirements forbid it.

Could anybody out there with experience with this issue give me further enlightenment as to whether my friends at Jive Software are correct?

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.

Affect on Page Rank
Recently for Quest Software, we changed the domain name of one of the communities. It was a fairly new community that had plans to become one of the most prolific communities for Quest Software. Prior to the name change, the site already had the Google Page Rank of 3/10 showing up in the Google Toolbar. Not long thereafter, the new URL was showing up with a Page Rank of 0/10. I was quite ashamed as I was the one who recommended the change to the shorter URL. I felt that I had damaged the site. Then someone from outside of the communities pointed out that my redirects where not 301 redirects, they were 302 redirects.

Frankly, at this time, I had never heard of a 301 redirect. But being open to learn new things, I researched the 301 redirects and found this post by Matt Cutts, http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-discussing-302-redirects/.

In a nutshell, a 301 redirect is a permenant redirect. A 302 redirect is a temporary redirect. The new domain name recieved a 302 redirect from the original domain name and hence a penalty in Google probably for being duplicate content of an existing domain. The original domain name was simply being considered as temporarily offline.

So I dug in and figured out that the redirects I had set up in IIS did not have the “a permanent redirection for this resource” box checked. Problem solved? At least now I have the redirect set up properly.

Here is an example of what a 301 redirect looks like in IIS.

Here are a couple of examples of doing 301 redirects when using Apache / Linux.
http://briannettles.com/2008/07/using-htaccess-to-redirect-a-single-webpage/
http://briannettles.com/2008/05/getting-rid-of-the-www-on-you-website/

It still took another 6 weeks or so for the page rank in the toolbar to change. It remained showing up in the toolbar with a ranking of 0/10 throughout this time. Then finally on July 31, it changed to a ranking of 4/10.

Affect on Search Engine Results
While I do not have clear knowledge of how the Quest site was affected in the search engine results, I do have a second example where I do know how it was affected.

My tire chain website had a name which I chose to get rid of. Originally, this obsolete website was the catalog for my new site. I was reluctant to ditch the orginal name at first for one reason–the placement on the long tail search results for “Rud tire chains” was good. While the results for “Tire Chains” was horrible on the original domain name being on page 35, the results for “Rud tire chains” was perfect in the number 2 spot on page 1–right behind the manufacturer’s web page. Now the new domain name showed up on page 15 for “Tire chains” - much better. However, it as in position 5 on page 1 for “Rud tire chains”. I did not want to lose that number 2 spot which the original domain name had. Also, I had already changed about as many of the links as I was going to get changed to the new domain name and I believe that mostly all of the link changes were already saturated in Google for about a two week time period.

I took a chance to see what would happen if I put up a 301 redirect from the old domain name to the catalog directory of the new domain name and placed all of the contents of the old site into the catalog directory of the new site.

There was no change in Google for about ten days. Then finally the 301 redirect kicked in with Google. The old domain name disappeared as I had expected. Then new domain name jumped up into the coveted number two spot that I was afraid to lose. I even jumped up two pages on Google for the keyword search of “Tire Chains” to where I am now on page 13. This was a total win for me. Now I have the domain name I like, the positive ranking of the old domain name, and improved ranking of the new domain name.

Conclusion
A 301 redirect is a critical piece that all SEO experts must be familiar with. Google appears to handle it very nicely. I have been warned in other blog posts that the other search engines may not be so friendly to the 301 redirect. Since the vast majority of my traffic comes from Google anyways, I am not all that concerned with it.