SEO and Directory Submissions Revisited | You Must Respect My Authorita!

Tim from LunaVista disagrees with me about the importance of directory submissions for SEO. What do you think? E-mail RachaelDror@hotmail.com

Rachael,


Wow – you’re tough on the Directory Submissions. So while they may not pass Page Rank, they can be useful in getting new sites visited sooner (and older sites visited more often).

Some links are going to bring huge benefits, ie. all the love that comes from Page Rank. Other links are just that, links – they help direct spiders around. And for new sites, the fact that directories are updated regularly and they give search engines a place to go to find new links and re-index others, is a good thing. While I would not put as much emphasis on search directory links as I used to, I would still use search directory links as part of a linking strategy for new web sites.

I don’t think search engines ignore search directories, they don’t give you much of a “bump” as far as rankings go, BUT, it they do provide a means for spiders to find / follow links (which they do – you can see it in your analytics).

For the same reasons these links used to be popular from a ranking standpoint, they are still important from an indexing standpoint. They expose materials to the search engines. You may not receive “link credit” or “page rank” from it (because let’s face it, it is an artificial indicator – everybody can purchase a link from a directory), it is a beneficial path for search indexing.

Same reason we use social bookmarking sites. They expose new materials to the search engines. We have seen a great response in getting new pages indexed when we bookmark them – even once! Still not much in the way of link love being passed, BUT we are getting the page indexed, and if it is well optimized and is a part of a good site, it will show results sooner than we used to see.


Best regards,



Tim Grant

lunavista communications corp


Tim,
Thank you for your thoughts on directory submissions. I guess only time will tell but as we all know, Google is constantly changing and improving their search algorithm in order to return the most relevant results possible. Do you remember when reciprocal linking worked to improve a sites relevance or when any link in would do? Google got wise to artificial linking patterns and started penalizing sites for irrelevant and reciprocal linking that didn't support a sites authority.

As South Park's Cartman says... "You must respect my authorita!". There is no magic bullet in Search Engine Optimization. The only sure fire way to keep your website ranking high in search results is to ask yourself is this going to increase my sites relevance and authority. Local directories and directories related to a site's content should by this standard still improve a website's standing.