Link-Building - Directories
-
Hello,
The SEO world is a bit confuse in the last months with the Google Antartic updates. Its normal since Google is trying to kill SEO to have more Adwords publicity results.
My most recent doubt is about directories. I heard Matt Cutts from Google in a recent Google Hangout saying that registering a website in directorys was ok, but not the ideal method to become relevant in the internet world. However it seems that this procedure is not against the Google policies.
Now, here in the forums, I already saw someone writing about adding your site to directories and how dangerous that situacion is.
So, whats your opinion about adding your site to free and pay directories as first link-building strategy? If directories are out of the question, why SEOmoz as a huge list of paid directorys? Is SEOmoz outdate?
-
Love your awser MetmiX and in my experience thats the way I feel about this question. I was just feeling the community....;)
-
The important point is that not all directories are equal. "Directory" really described the structure of a website. However for many is SEO it refers to the thousands of directories that exist only to "help" sites rank in google.
So, if you were promoting a car tyre shop and found "Bobs Auto Resource site" where Bob picked great firms, wrote up what he liked about them and was itself linked from other quality looking sites then that would likely be a good resource.
However "Bobs cheap SEO friendly directory" that listed virtually any site that submitted itself, added no value to those listings, was full of rubbish and linked from equal rubbish would not be as good.
Damn that Bob and his wildly varied site quality.
-
Stick to vendor listings and niche directories and stay away from seo directories
-
There are very few directories that are worth much anymore because they have so many external links the links are devalued I think you still might get some benefit from the few super popular directories like yahoo & dmoz.
Stick to paid.. or human verified
-
I'm new to this so I might be off the mark but when I look for directories for SEO I will also consider the directory itself as a source of traffic, unless I'm mistaken and most of them are just "SERP machines", which I suppose isn't so bad becuase the good ones with standards are like Search Engines outsourcing for humans examining and verifying sites at 0 cost?
-
Hi Pedro,
Very nice question. I was thinking to place this question too, but you have allready placed it. I am using the directory-list from seomoz, and i invested more than 2500$ in a 3 Months, i see results, i see positive results, my competitors are not so strong, but it would be nice if someone answer our answer here.
But from my opinion, i think the directories are not so Powerfull, it helps, maybe really less, but if you think to make a good link metric for your domains, than i think every type of backlinks what we use, directory, press release, news article on newspapers, rss feeds, blogsubmission, css gallery, i think it helps, because we do on a natural way. I think is good and it helps, on my situation it helps, but on yours maybe not, it depends on your competitors, if they are strong, and hiring strong quality backlinks from new york times, cnn etc.. than you must hire the same quality of links, with a directories can't take a higher position.
Thanks
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
-
Too many dofollow links = penalty?
Hi. I currently have 150 backlinks, 90% of them are dofollow, while only 10% are nofollow. I recently hit position #10 for my main keyword, but now it is dropped to #16 and a lot of related keywords are gone. So I have a few questions: 1. Was my website penalized for having an unnatural backlink profile (too many dofollow links), or maybe this drop in positions is just a temporary, natural thing? 2. Isn’t it too late for making the backlink profile look more natural by building more nofollow backlinks and making it 50%/50%? Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NathalieBr0 -
Backlink, how to delete or find who is linking to me?
Hi there guys, Can someone tell me how I go about finding who is linking to my site or how to find backlinks to my site and if it is a spam site or a site I don't know or want linking to me, how to stop them from linking to me and also how to delete their link? Thanks appreciate the time Cheers
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Obscene anchor text linking to non-existent pages on my site
My website seems to be rapidly accumulating links from what seem to be reputable websites and which are going to non-existent pages on my website. The anchor text of many of these links is obscene. Here is the URL of one of the pages that is linking to me. I contacted the originating site a couple of weeks ago and they are looking into it but I've not heard back. I'm guessing the originating sites have been hacked. Should I be concerned? Why are they linking to pages on my site that don't exist? http://www.radicalartistsagency.com/htmlarea/language/0content_abo_utus.html Looking at the page source of this page reveals the hidden links.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MartinDS0 -
Rank Drop Possibly due to links but no warning in GWT
Hello, We've been experiencing rank drop in all major keywords for the past 9 months. I've had different people say different things here at Moz about how backlinks effect rank drop. Brilliant answers, but different opinions. Nothing is showing up in GWT for this site. Here's the backlink breakdown: 72 linking root domains. 20 of those are blogs. These blogs have no backlinks in and of themselves, and were created originally as easy links. Not white hat stuff. Three additional root domains are still paid links in this profile, though all but one was made to look editorial. The one that doesn't look editorial has links sprinkled throughout their website, among other paid links. The rest of the linking root domains (49) are legitimate. Again, nothing shows up in GWT. We had 96 root domains last March but in March of 2013 we cut most of the paid links and half (20) of the blogs. This brought our ranking down immediately by 2 or 3 slots. We've been slipping every since. I would like people to speak from experience and let me know if you think the backlinks could be causing the ranking drop and what to do about it. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Fix Bad Links in Google
I have a client who had some grey hat SEO done in the past. Some of their back links aren't from the best neighborhoods. Google didn't seem to mind until 9/28, when they literally disappeared for all searches except for their domain name. Google still has their site indexed, but it's just not showing up. There are no messages in Webmaster Tools. I know Bing has the tool where you can disavow bad links and ask them to discount them. Google doesn't have such a tool, but what is the strategy when you don't have control over the link sources, such as in blog comments? Could this update have been a delayed Penguin ranking change from the latest Penguin Update on the 18th? http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Tom
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TomBristol0 -
How do you remove unwanted links, built by your previous SEO company?
We dropped significantly (from page 1 for 4 keywords...to ranking over 75 for all) after the Penguin update. I understand trustworthy content and links (along with site structure) are the big reasons for staying strong through the update...and those sites that did these things wrong were penalized. In efforts to gain Google's trust again, we are checking into our site structure and making sure to produce fresh and relevant content on our site and social media channels on a weekly basis. But how do we remove links that were built by our SEO company, those of which could be untrustworthy/irrelevant sites with low site rankings? Try to email the webmaster of that site (using data from Open Site Explorer)?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | clairerichards0 -
Is it worthwhile to remove a large quantity of lesser quality links if you are able to do so easily?
So I've recently started working at a new company where I lead up their SEO efforts. In regards to link building I've discovered that a little over 75% of the anchor text on the links to the homepage (at least of the 10k SEOmoz provides) are non branded keywords. We don't appear to have any penalties, however, in my opinion we have what is an unnatural link profile for our homepage. As I investigated further I've noticed that a lot of these links (not all) are from irrelevant blogs where the link is found in the footer. (Clearly this was the result of some less than ideal get links quick strategy that was implemented in the past.) At first I was overwhelmed thinking that I'd have to try and contact these sites individually to see if I could get the link removed, however, I soon discovered that the site these links are actually linking to is not our domain, but is instead a domain that redirects to our site. So this brings me to my question: Should I remove the redirect from this other site to rid myself of these links. The white hat side of me strongly thinks this is a good step forward, however, a small part of me wonders what the ramifications would be. These types of redirects seem to account for a fairly high number of links, however what value that actually contribute is difficult to know. Any thoughts?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Poindexter0 -
Are unusual chinese links likely to be black hat?
Hello, I noticed that this onepage website: http://www.clearpixel.net/ ranks at #11 for web design London so I did some research using SEO Moz Pro. Turns out that alll their links are from Chinese directory style sites. Does this demonstrate black hat SEO? If not, how do I go about getting links on Chinese sites with .gov urls. Many thanks, Martin Hofschroer
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MartinHof0