A few years ago you didn’t hear terms like “authority site” or “PR5 and above” when people talked about directory submissions. You certainly didn’t consider “niche specific” to be a category you had to pay attention to. Today, all of these are relevant, and the list of directories that will actually give you link juice is shrinking rapidly. Try submitting to the wrong ones and you’ll see your page rank drop, not increase. Submit to enough that are blacklisted and you might just disappear into search engine oblivion.
Forget the Bing and Yahoo rankings for now. If you do an analysis of them along with your Google page ranks you might think you’re actually in good shape. Neither has made the algorithmic changes Google has yet, so you can still rank high with bad links. Unfortunately, Google accounts for over 90% of search traffic, so it’s their rules we have to play by. If they say a directory is blacklisted, don’t submit your site there. If you don’t know which is which, don’t submit anything. Let us do it for you.
The same rules apply to social bookmarking. The social media platform hasn’t been new for almost a decade and there are now thousands of them out there. You can easily build one yourself using content management systems that have been developed specifically for the task. Don’t think that, just because it looks like Facebook, it’s a good choice to link to. There are social media sites out there that are either too new or have already developed a bad reputation. Linking to either will decrease your page rank.
How do you keep track of it all? You don’t. Many of our clients have tried to do their own SEO and found that they continuously went backwards, not forward in search rankings. We keep track of the good sites and the bad, the algorithmic changes, the evolutions and revolutions that affect our industry, and we apply that knowledge to get the best results for you. The list of quality directories is shrinking because poor quality and link farms have been exposed. It’s actually good for business, as our clients have learned to their benefit. Call us anytime and we’ll explain why.
