Directory Quality for Citation Building
-
Hello All,
Just started to work on a new clients site that has been hit with multiple google penalties. I was looking at their backlink profile and noticed they have numerous links from what seem to be very low quality directory websites. My question is, when building citations and looking for directories to submit to, what makes one directory more credible then another one? If most of them are just publishing links and business information, why does google consider one credible and the other spammy? Clearly with some it's easy to tell if they are credible or not, but with some it is not as easy. Should you only really be submitting to the best of the best or are some lower lever ones ok too? Have read a few things on this topic, but most is older and just want to hear what people have to say on this today. Thanks.
-
No problem.
A big give away is normally the URL, for instance anything with numbers in is a big red flag.
I have just updated our profile as I noticed we hadn't included our websites. Hope you find some useful citations on the list!
J
-
Hey Jamie,
Thanks for the response. Yes I agree that the eye test is usually a good barometer for determining the quality of a site and good to hear this applies to directories as well. I'll check out the post, pretty sure I can find it, thanks for the heads up.
-
Hey jStrong
Generally a lot of web directories are seen as spammy but you can separate the wheat from the chaff by looking at the DA and PA using the Moz toolbar. Normally your first impression will tell you whether you should be leaving a listing or not. My advice would be to stick to well known local directories and ones that are attached to reputable news/media outlets that have enough readership.
Incidentally we have a blog post on our website at the moment with a list of must have citations that are normally our first port-of-call with new websites. PM me if you want the link as i'm not sure if its classed as advertising on the forums.
J
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
-
Impact of May 2015 quality update and July Panda update on specialty brands or niche retail
We are seeing the following trend in our rankings and traffic after the recent Google algorithm updates (May 2015 quality/phantom, and July 2015 Panda), and I am curious if anyone here has encountered similar and/or has any good ideas on how to react. Background - we operate in a niche segment, but compete for keywords with large home improvement stores and mass retailers. In the past, prior to May 2015, we generally ranked higher than the large home improvement stores and mass retailers for our key specific terms in our niche. We believed that it was because we have a very specialized focus and so our store was highly relevant for someone searching in that niche (for example for the name of the product category as a keyword). In general, we ranked #1-3. Along with a few of our competitors in our niche. And then would be the big box home improvement stores in spots 5-10. The change we saw starting in May is that now all the home improvement stores and also a few large multi-category retailers took over those top 5 spots and bumped all the specialty retailers and the specialty brand manufacturers (like us) down. Our direct competitors in our niche all seem to have been impacted pretty much the same as us. So, in summary it seems like these latest updates may have favored the more general retailers but with stronger domain authority than the more specific but smaller retailers. Hard to know for sure, but this is the trend we believe we see. So, that said, what are some good strategies to respond to this situation? We can't really compete on overall domain authority with these huge retailers. And our previously successful strategy of having a very focused niche, with lots of helpful content, videos, instructional guides, etc. no longer seems to be enough. Has anyone else seen similar results since this past May? Where specialty retail or brand sites lost ground to larger general retailers? And if so, has anyone found any good strategies to gain back their previous rankings, or at least partially?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drewk1 -
Subdomains vs directories on existing website with good search traffic
Hello everyone, I operate a website called Icy Veins (www.icy-veins.com), which gives gaming advice for World of Warcraft and Hearthstone, two titles from Blizzard Entertainment. Up until recently, we had articles for both games on the main subdomain (www.icy-veins.com), without a directory structure. The articles for World of Warcraft ended in -wow and those for Hearthstone ended in -hearthstone and that was it. We are planning to cover more games from Blizzard entertainment soon, so we hired a SEO consultant to figure out whether we should use directories (www.icy-veins.com/wow/, www.icy-veins.com/hearthstone/, etc.) or subdomains (www.icy-veins.com, wow.icy-veins.com, hearthstone.icy-veins.com). For a number of reason, the consultant was adamant that subdomains was the way to go. So, I implemented subdomains and I have 301-redirects from all the old URLs to the new ones, and after 2 weeks, the amount of search traffic we get has been slowly decreasing, as the new URLs were getting index. Now, we are getting about 20%-25% less search traffic. For example, the week before the subdomains went live we received 900,000 visits from search engines (11-17 May). This week, we only received 700,000 visits. All our new URLs are indexed, but they rank slightly lower than the old URLs used to, so I was wondering if this was something that was to be expected and that will improve in time or if I should just go for subdomains. Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | damienthivolle0 -
Adding a Directory to Successful Article Website
We are considering adding roughly 1,300 pages to a 2,300 page website within the drug rehab niche. Our website is generating roughly 10,000 uniques from Search / month. **Is there a way to estimate the change in traffic to the existing content on the site when we add 30-40% pages in the form of a directory? ** **Is there a way to estimate the effect of the existing traffic and links to our newly added part of the site (the directory)? **
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alltreatment0 -
Paid for Yahoo Directory months ago, yet does not display in OSE
Hi Mozzers, How long does it normally take for your yahoo directory link to show up in Open Site Explorer? We signed up and got our link on dir.yahoo early January and still see nothing in OSE. Should I call them up and ask them to fetch the page for Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
Get a refund? Helps!
Thanks!0 -
PDF for link building - avoiding duplicate content
Hello, We've got an article that we're turning into a PDF. Both the article and the PDF will be on our site. This PDF is a good, thorough piece of content on how to choose a product. We're going to strip out all of the links to our in the article and create this PDF so that it will be good for people to reference and even print. Then we're going to do link building through outreach since people will find the article and PDF useful. My question is, how do I use rel="canonical" to make sure that the article and PDF aren't duplicate content? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
SEOMoz Paid Directories List.... Are paid links always bad?
We all know paid links are bad.... so it begs the question.... why does the SEOMoz directory list have so many directories that only submit businesses for a fee.... i.e. a paid link. Are they worth paying for or not? Interested to hear peoples thoughts and experiences with some of the directories listed on the SEOMoz directory list....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
How would you use this broken link building opportunity?
I've found a good opportunity to build some links and I'd love your opinions on my options here. There's a big event that happens once a year in my city. Let's say the event used to have a website called www.CityEvent.com. The event decided not to use this website anymore, but instead to put all of their event information on their facebook page. It looks like they let their domain name expire and someone else snapped it up. It's now sitting as an empty wordpress blog with one line of text. This empty website has 1300 links pointing to it. I can see two opportunities here: 1. Write a very thorough article on my website (that I am trying to build links to) describing the event and giving people all of the information that they need to know about it. (The amount of information on the Facebook page is minimal.) or 2. Create a new website called www.EventCity.com and put up a static page with all of the information that people need to know. There would be a link on this page pointing to the site that I am trying to rank. In both cases there would be much more information than is available on the Facebook page including a collection of youtube videos about the event and many helpful links for people who are interested in this type of event. Then the plan is to contact the sites who are linking to the dead page and invite them to link to my new page (either on my site or the new site that I could create). I see a few pros and cons to each method. For option #2 I think people would be more likely to link to a more official looking page rather than an article on a separate website. (My website has information about the city in question but is not closely related to the event at all.) However, I would only be getting one link back to my site. One negative to this is that the actual organizers of the event may not be pleased that someone has created an official looking page. But then again, perhaps they would be happy to have a free website. For option #1 I would possibly get more links from sites that are authoritative in my city that point directly to the site I am trying to rank. However, people would be less likely to link to us because we are not an official site for the event, but simply a very good article about the event. There are no other good articles for this event that are ranking on Google. Hopefully that makes sense. What would you do? EDIT - Just thought of a third option - try to buy the domain.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarieHaynes0 -
Do Banner Ads Help In Link Building?
We have been contacting some webmasters for building links, but a lot of them will only do banner ads on there site. Is having a keyword rich alt tag on the banner ad and a do follow link to our site just as good? Would like to hear your thoughts and l experiences in trying to leverage these banner ads to help in seo ranking. Thank you in advance for your input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | anchorwave0