What is SEO?

Having had our bigtangle directory up and running for quite a few months now, it has about 3,500 sites listed and has at last got PageRank - pagerank may not be important for a lot of websites but it is for a directory. OK it’s only a PR3 with internal categories PR2 but its a start.

Meanwhile I have a second directory, five weeks old - never announced, never had a submission, and only with a few selected inbound links, as opposed to bigtangle which has over 1000 inbound links. The curious thing is, that also has PR3 with internal categories PR2. The directory is at wilddarkness.com if you are interested (currently accepting quality reciprocal entries but not free submissions).

On ‘non-directory’ sites I have an old site that I haven’t changed much for many months, that has increased to a PR4, and two other sites that I have been working hard on, with both relevant link exchanges and directory submissions, and neither has increased PR (both are currently PR4).

Now, perhaps it is just harder to get PR5, and perhaps the inbound links on the older site have increased in value. But it would be easy to conclude that making lots of directory submissions to new and free directories is a waste of time.

From the pagerank point of view, I think that submission to free, low pagerank, directories has only a small effect. If you do a couple of hundred, a site should reach PR2 or PR3, and then you should be well placed to do link exchanges - for although we all know pagerank is un-important, it is much easier to do them when you have it!

So I believe that directory submissions do still play a role in establishing a new site. I am also still very enthusiastic about directory submissions, because I believe they carry important weight in the search engine results. One site that I submitted to lots of free directories has not increased PR but does have a much improved position in the search engine results.

But care is still needed. I have a small site that I would like to compete for a fairly competitive term, but don’t have the time to spend working on it. So by way of experiment I signed up for a ’submit your site to 200 directories for $50′ service (both figures are probably wrong but you get the idea).

This submission service used the same anchor text for all the submissions. Shortly after the submissions were made, the site went storming to the top of google results. But as soon as I had cracked open the champagne, off it went again, disappearing somewhere onto page 500.

Three months later it is back to page 2. Is that attributable to the original submissions to directories, or because it would have reached that point anyway? I don’t know of course. But the conclusion is, if you make lots of directory submissions, keep varying the anchor text and description.

You might also prefer to make your submissions over an extended period of time - although it seems unlikely there is a penalty for building links too quickly, I think there might well be a penalty for over-doing it - for example, if your taget phrase is ‘big yellow sunflowers’ and the number one site for ‘big yellow sunflowers’ has five links with that text, and you suddenly turn up with 150 identical links for the same text, I believe you you could actually be penalised.

If you have 15 decent links, around text like ‘yellow sunflowers’, ‘big sunflowers’, ‘big yellow flowers’ etc that will be of much greater benefit in the long term, although it will take a little longer to reach the number one spot for your particular phrase.

Slightly off the subject of directories, but this approach also works better against changes in googles algorithms. If you focus a site on one phrase and nothing else you are very susceptible to a change in the google ranking formula - I can say from experience that a site can go from top of the search results to ‘I can’t find it anymore’ very very quickly!

I intend to continue to operate the two directories in this way - submitting bigtangle often, and wilddarkness only when quality opportunities arise, so that I can continue to compare the results. I’ll report back in a few months.