A Peculiar Blog

Another one of the old standbys when it comes to promoting a website or
blog is to submit your url for inclusion in directory sites. Over the
years I’ve tried different approaches to this tactic.

First I spent time going to all of the major search engines and
submitting the url there. Later I learned that submitting to SE’s
(search engines) like Google, Yahoo, MSN and others isn’t really
necessary as long as there was a least one site that had a link to
yours. When the spiders crawled the site, they’d find the link to your
site and before too long it would be crawled and indexed. With only one
link it might take a while, but it would almost certainly happen that
way automatically without the need to submit your site directly.

My next big discovery was search engine submission tools. Programs that,
given some information about the site you’re promoting, would then
automatically submit your url to a list of hundreds, even thousands of
search engines. The thing I learned about these tools is that most of
them aren’t worth the time to download them and that in some cases, I
think using them actually hurt the site I was trying to promote.

This is because they weren’t really getting my site listed on hundreds
or thousands of real search engines. Instead they were listing the sites
on that many FFA (Free For All) Links pages. These pages are mostly link
farms that require you to hand them an email address to accept your url.
The url would in fact be listed on the FFA page, but since those pages
typically get hit by lots of people using autosubmitters, the link to
your site wouldn’t stay on the site for very long. Often it would cycle
off in less than an hour. The main result from all this was to generate
boatloads of spam emails disguised as "Confirmation of your submission"
emails that also contained some kind of marketing pitch from the person
who owned that particular FFA site.

Now I’ve come full circle. Once again after years of trying different
things, I’m manually submitting a couple of urls to a huge list of
sites. I found this list after a good bit of reading in
alt.internet.search-engines and spending a bunch of time googling for
it. What I found is a list of SEO
Friendly Link Directories.

This is a list of over 500 directories that many of which will include
your link for free or with a reciprocal link and a bunch of them that
are offering paid inclusion. What makes them "SEO Friendly" is that when
your link is included in the directory it’s in a position to be crawled
by the SE’s. They also do not use ‘nofollow’ on your link which means
that Google will follow it and it will count toward your pagerank. While
I don’t think anyone outside of Google really knows the pagerank
formula, I do know that the more links there are pointing to your site,
the better.

I am working on getting a couple of sites submitted to as many of these
as I can. I expect to have created several hundred additional inbound
links for these sites and that when Google recalculates PageRank again
sometime in late April or early May, the PR on those sites will go up
and so will their visibility in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

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