How important are directory submissions to my off-page SEO?
-
Hi Guys,
One area of my link building that I carry out is looking for online directories and social bookmarking websites to submit my website to. I do this in order to gain some backlinks to my website. What I want to know is are they really worth my time, and if so, which types would you say are the most important?
I have obviously been through many directory lists, both on SEOmoz and on other websites, and also performed various searches to find relevant directories to my website. I just feel that posting up a link that lies deep in a directory online that, more often than not, have very low PA and lots of outbound links will offer very little in terms of SEO. If anything, this could really bring down the quality of my links and be detrimental to my website, right?
This is a subject that I have been thinking about for a while and especially with the recent algorithm update from Google and the attack on many web directories that are, lets say, 'not playing by the rules', I'm worried that this will have a negative impact for my website.
Let me know your thoughts guys and if you have any tips on how to get higher quality links from these kind of submission then I'm all ears!
Matt.
-
Hi Matthew,
My advice on the matter has changed a lot over the past year. These days, it's still okay to build directory links, but I suggest doing it only with directories related to your niche.
General directories, in my mind, are best to stay away from altogether.
For example, if you run a nursing home site, you could probably find a dozen high quality directories of nursing homes and assisted living facilities. These would be great!
The general rule of thumb is if you build directory links, make sure you build "normal" high quality links along with them at an equal pace. Try to build one naturally given editorial link for each directory link you build.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!
-
Yes, most of the 500 will be worthless junk, and can actually hurt you.
In general, the easier it is to score a directory link, the less value it becomes. It's a completely inverse relationship.
-
I'd use directory listing strategically - you don't want 500 listings showing up this week. If someone is delivering 500 links I would be concerned because it would certainly not have a natural appearance.
Directories are a part of an overall strategy and my approach, for what it's worth, is to add a directory listing slowly - perhaps one or two per week - and vary the anchor text and link to different pages of your site to vary things up.
I'd love to say that great content gets linked to and I'm willing to be converted, I just don't see it all that often in the real world.
Can someone point me to some small or medium sized business websites (non-SEO related) that have great inbound links generated almost entirely with content and linkbait? I'm continually open to learning.
-
Thanks Mark,
I have been spending quite a bit of time looking through my competitors' linking sites so it is good to know that that wasn't in vain.
I completely agree with you about linkbait, it can be very hard work and the success rate is very different each time (which can be great at times but extremely frustrating at others!).
One thing I have always wondered is that a lot of SEO companies will offer, lets say, 500 directory submissions to clients each month. Do you think that a lot of these links are just worthless links, and if you don't mind divulging, how many directories would you say you submit to on average each month? (just so I can get an idea of the scale of what I should be aiming for).
Thanks again.
-
In my opinion online directories still have value and are one part of creating a link profile for your site. I would recommend you look closely at the inbound followed links of your key competitors who rank well. I almost always find online directories in the link profiles of my high ranking competitors.
Directories specfic to your topic or industry are more valuable, of course, as they also have the potential to drive traffic.
In theory linkbait is the optimial and most espoused method for gaining inbound links, but the effectiveness of this strategy varies depending on how interactive folks in your market tend to be. I doubt there is a more active community involved in creating linkable content than the SEO community.
Having said that, whether you are attracting links to your content or not, you should actively build high quality, well researched content. This will bring traffic and possibly links.
Hope this helps.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Stuck on page 2
I had a site that was ranking for hundreds of keywords, I got hit with a link penalty, got the link penalty removed by creating disavow file, reconsideration request. Last couple of months my site is stuck on page 2 and won't seem to move up. Thoughts?
Link Building | | interstate0 -
How relevant are citations to SEO?
'How much do citations help your seo in view of the direction that google seems to be headed where content is king? Should the citations not be relevant to your site?'.
Link Building | | arthureray0 -
How can I find page 1 google keyword rankings for a certain page?
Not sure if someone has a tool for this yet or not... Say I have a page like this: http://www.merchantcircle.com/business/Spokane.Painting.Pros.509-210-2799 and I would like to find out what keywords this page ranks for on google. Is there any tool that I can paste in that link and it would give me keywords that it ranks well for? Other than the SEO moz rank checker. It's not like I want to run a campaign just for links like that but I might want to build some links to citations like that so I can move those citations up in the rankings.
Link Building | | Superflys0 -
Do hyphenated searches impact SEO?
Something I recently considered was whether a hyphen in a search term would effect the results that come up. For example, Is there a difference between using 'i-phone' and 'i phone' as anchor text? Some of my search results seem similar but do show some slight differences. Can anyone shed light on the matter?
Link Building | | davidbenjamin0 -
Local seo + phone number ?
I read that if I want successful local SEO campaign, I should use the same phone number in all my citations. But some citations are local for UK and I do not need to write the phone code +44, others require to use the phone code since they are international. Is it bad for my local SEO using 2 different numbers (with and without phone code) and how to avoid it ?
Link Building | | digitalkiddie2 -
Article submission to multiple directories
We know the general consensus among the crowd here is to avoid free article submission directories. But we have to do this as part of our overall deliverables and have hit a roadblock. A couple of our agencies are insisting that we submit one article to multiple sites - which we contend would trigger duplicate content issue and render all links useless. Any feedback on submitting one article to multiple article sites?
Link Building | | eBrandz0 -
Friendly and pages regular expression
Hi, I am trying to fix this with a reg expression but I dont know how. Here is the example: I would like to have my link like this: mysite.com/noticias/123/here-comes-the-title-page-2 I have a mod_rewrite rule with this: RewriteRule ^/noticias/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9-]+)-(pagina)-([0-9]+)$ /myphp.php?&id=$1&ipag=$4 [L,NC] It doesnt work. I think that the problem resides here ([a-zA-Z0-9-]+) because the title is split with "-" and the rule doenst know when the title finish. Now, if I have a rule like this it works: mysite.com/noticias/123/here-comes-the-title_page-2 RewriteRule ^/noticias/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9-]+)_(pagina)-([0-9]+)$ /myphp.php?&id=$1&ipag=$4 [L,NC] How can I fix this to have a "-pagina" instead of "_pagina" Thanks
Link Building | | informatica8100 -
Links from Directory's
I have been looking at the Directory's recommended on the SEOMOZ site. All of those that I have looked into do not appear to have a page rank for the actual page that my link would be appearing on. They all appear to offer N/A as the reply.Is this a problem? Thanks in advance for any replies!
Link Building | | Babyshoe0