There are a lot of shallow, spammy, ugly websites out there… that’s what I learned. These sites aren’t created for people, they’re created to rank for a couple of keywords, just enough to get a little traffic, and then hope for someone to quickly click an ad on their navigationless single page site. I started to see things from Google’s perspective after looking at site after junky site. If I were to decide which sites were accepted by asking myself “Would I recommend this site to a friend”, not many would be. Actually, I would end up with a really bad neighborhood if I linked to every site that was submitted. In July, 60% of the traffic came from India which tells me a lot of people are paying to build links. For you directory submitters out there, I have a few tips from my experience on this end.
Tips for Submitting to Directories
- Be absolutely sure you submit to the correct category. If your site is about website design, don’t submit to “Internet”. If I had deleted all sites that submitted to the wrong category, 90% wouldn’t be there. Approving sites is time consuming and it’s a lot easier for the directory owner to reject a site in the wrong category than to read the site, decide where it should go and change the category. It helps to have your site on the correct page as far as search engines go also. I would rather be on a website design page with other website design sites than on the Internet page with various types of sites even if the PR was higher.
- Link back to the page your site is on when you are accepted. This helps it get crawled, especially if it’s a new directory and none of the pages are indexed. It doesn’t do any good if you get a link and the search engines don’t know it’s there.
- Be clear with your description, don’t use all lowercase or all uppercase, and be sure it makes sense. 40% of the submissions were keyword stuffed nonsense. Why would I want to put that on my site? I started to see a pattern after a few hundred sites. I noticed that a well written description usually meant a higher quality site and a poorly written description usally meant a made for AdSense (MFA) site or something that was thrown together in a couple of hours or a computer generated site. I could tell who was trying to game me and who was sincere just by looking at the description and the url.
- Spellcheck your description and title. If you don’t care enough about the submission to spellcheck it then you probably don’t care about the site you’re submitting. Do you really want me to fix the spelling, grammar and category? Really?
- If your site is rejected, don’t get your feelings hurt. It just means that the first impression of your site to this total stranger was very bad (Or it falls outside the guidelines of site submissions. You should always read those.) You need to fix it, not complain about how unfair it is. Just make your site better and it won’t get rejected.
Good sites are linked to naturally. Bad sites aren’t. If your site isn’t getting any natural links, you might consider spending a good bit of time researching your niche, building more content, participating in the community and getting a nice looking template before submitting to any more directories.
