Directory Submissions: The Ways And Means Of Building Massive Inbound Links

Do some extra reading on directory submissions online and you’ll find a lot of opinions on the subject, most of them based on old information or a misinterpretation of recent developments. An effective directory submission process is reliant on two very important marketing principles:


Driving traffic to your website

Building link popularity to your website
Driving Traffic Through Directory Submissions
Directory submissions are effective in driving traffic to your website for one reason and one reason only: People interested in visiting sites like yours visit those directories to find what they are looking for and they typically find the directory in one of two ways:


Through a search query at one of the search engines
By referral from someone they know and trust


It doesn’t really matter how a visitor who visits your website found the directory that lead them there. The important thing is that someone found you through a directory. But if you don’t submit your site to the directory then no one can find you. Directories don’t crawl websites like search engines do so the only way your site can be listed in a directory is if someone submits it there.

Using Directory Submissions To Build Link Popularity

Link popularity is the measure of your website’s inbound links. Many people think it boils down to the number of links that point to your website, but that’s only a part of the equation. The other part is the quality of the links and that quality is measured by several factors as well. Some of the factors that influence link popularity include:


Age of the website linking to you
Authority of the website that links to you
The relevance in topic or subject matter of the website linking to you
The above three factors as they pertain to the specific page linking to you
Anchor text, or specific words and phrases, used to link to your website
How quickly your link popularity develops
Diversity of link mix


Virtually everyone who understands link building agrees on the first six factors of the link popularity equation. Where much of the confusion comes in is when discussions about link diversity come up. In a word, the search engines don’t like to see all of your links coming from the same type of website or websites of a particular nature. That is, if you build up 1,000 links in a single day and all of them are from directories then that might not help you much with the search engines. On the other hand, if you build up your link popularity slowly and include links from sources other than directories, 1,000 links from general website directories could very well be a positive.

Directory Submissions Are Not The Devil’s Girlfriend

One common misconception about directory submissions is that they are no longer effective. This just simply isn’t true. Google doesn’t favor one directory over any other. It does, however, discount links from link farms and bad neighborhoods. That’s why it is important to choose your directories carefully.


What it boils down to is why you are seeking a link from a directory in the first place. Search engines don’t want you building links just so you can increase your search engine rankings. They want you to build links in a natural way. That’s why directory submissions are not a bad thing if you add those submissions to a diversified portfolio of links rather than focus on directory submissions alone.