Directory Submissions For SEO Link Building

Directory submissions have long been used to assist in the building of an SEO link profile. While some directories have been devalued in the eyes of search engine algorithms, choosing search engine friendly directories with a good level of traffic can help build links that are beneficial to SEO and may also drive good levels of traffic off their own back.

An SEO friendly directory should enable the search engine spiders to follow links to the resulting pages. Some use nofollow and noindex links and these offer no benefit for SEO. Check the directory pages to determine whether this is the case or not and make a judgement depending on potential traffic. Also try to avoid directories that are not well categorised or contain too many outbound links on a single page.

New websites are known to suffer from the Google sandbox effect. Google aims to offer quality search results that link to equally high quality pages. They believe that older websites, or those websites that are more likely to stick around, are also more likely to offer a better standard of content to visitors. As such, new websites are monitored for such activity as building too many links too quickly.

The best link profiles are diverse collections of relevant, quality links from other web pages. While numbers do count, better quality links from more highly regarded websites are preferable to masses of low quality links. This is especially true in the early days of a website and SEO campaign, when a site can be caught in the Google sandbox.