Directories are old school when it comes to the Internet, and there’s been some questions about them. Are they still valid? Should you bother? What directories are good/bad or don’t matter?

If you’ve been wondering… We’ve got some thoughts…

Lee Collins
Managing Director
StomperNet, LLC

“The five essential entrepreneurial skills for success are concentration, discrimination, organization, innovation and communication.” ~ Michael Faraday

Are Link Directories Still Relevant?

When the Internet was still fairly new, the best known site for typing keywords that applied to what you were looking for was Yahoo.com. It was organized into different categories, and you could either pick a category that you were interested in learning more about or type a search term in to find different category listings.

Though it had a search element, Yahoo didn’t move to crawler-based results until around 2002. Before that, it was most definitely more directory than search engine.

That was in the mid-90s and since the inception of Yahoo, many other directories have popped up on the Web, both good and bad.

Five years ago, it was cool to add your link to any directory that existed. All backlinks — free or paid — were good links, and no matter where they came from, they boosted your place in the SERPs.

Fast forward to 2011, and things have changed. Though Yahoo is still a well-respected force online, and Google isn’t the ONE big dog that it used to be, it’s still making heavy ripples throughout the Web — when something happens there, everyone still pays attention.

With recent changes, we have reason to wonder — are link directories so yesterday, or do they even matter?

Google did one thing with the recent Panda update, and that was to make low-quality, poor content sites targets for devaluation. But even some of the big dogs were howling. We saw respected sites like Ezine Articles, Mahalo, and HubPages suffering severe ranking and traffic damage. And we know that the issues that these sites faced was the duplicate content issue.

But other sites, which Google considers to be “low-quality,” suffered from lack of content of any kind — the scrapers, the squeeze pages (which never really ranked anyway), and maybe… online link directories?

How are they stacking up? You’d think that since they have little content, aside from site descriptions, that they might have been impacted negatively. For some of them, that’s true, but for others, their traffic actually increased dramatically. Panda loved them! Check out these stats, recently gathered from SEMRush.com:

Apparently, Google found value in some directories and not in others. The traffic differences before and after were astounding!

Notice that its own DMOZ.org dropped almost 300,000 visitors after Panda, whereas Yahoo improved by more than 45.5 million! Other directories fared in differing amounts of traffic, up and down, across the board.

But the shakeout is not over. In April, Business.com dropped like a stone to around 99K visitors, a mere 1/10 of the traffic the site was getting.

So, what happened?

We can only guess. However, directories returning lots of 404 links would definitely not be viewed favorably. Sites offering sitewide linking was another consideration, which has always been something Google frowned upon, even when buying links hadn’t been demonized by the search giant a few years ago..

It’s easy to sit back and make assumptions, but the fact is that directories that improved in traffic are the type you’ll want to target if part of your SEO strategy is to include them in your backlinking process. But if you’re just going for potential traffic, remember that things have changed. Entering your site could be a total waste of time these days.

So, how do you decide whether to bother at all, and if you do want to add your site to any of the online directories, what criteria should you follow before shelling out any amount of cash?

Here are three tips for making sure your one-way backlink is valuable:

1. Find only human-edited directories. If the directory is a paid option and says that sites are reviewed, be sure that the sites it has registered are quality sites and that they really are looking for sites with great content to improve the Web. Also check their refund policy if your site is rejected. Some of them do refund partial or entire fees paid.
2. Make sure that there aren’t too many ads running on the site. If there are, it’s a sure bet that if it hasn’t happened already, the site will lose impact over time.
3. Can you find a category that is 100% relevant to your site? Make sure that a local directory listing category is in line your niche, too. Don’t just submit to be included without evaluating the value of doing so first.

Gaining one-way links from quality directories is still a great start-up strategy for getting a new site going. Solid directory backlinks are still valued by all of the search engines and are a good basis to build upon. However, if you don’t continue to gather backlinks for a page, the effect will decrease over time, so if you’re in it for the long haul, create a system to keep the backlinks flowing.

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SEO SECRET SAUCE

Now that you know how directories can still be beneficial, here are some tips about what NOT to do when considering your options:

1. Do not use the same anchor text in every directory link. Make things look more natural, as if other people are recommending or “voting” for your site.
2. Remember that Yahoo or DMOZ can be worth 20 of the lower echelon links combined.
3. This backlinking strategy tends to work best with Yahoo and Bing in terms of it having a SERPs impact, but you can still get directory traffic from Google if your site is listed in a highly visible directory.
4. Regularly updated and respected blogs in your niche will tend to drive more traffic, if that’s what you’re looking for, so guest posting would be a better way to go than paying for a $300 listing that has minimal traffic itself. Check Alexa rankings and other indicators of overall site traffic to find out.
5. Most directories online are nothing more than link spam. Be very careful about the directories you choose. Just because a site is free and seems like a good deal doesn’t mean that it won’t hurt your SEO more than help.

THE STOMPER BUZZ

“We have web pages and web sites on the first page of Google for nearly every keyword that we are interested in having that for, and that’s because of StomperNet.”

Otto Collins

FREE LIVE WEBINARS NEXT WEEK:

ENCORE PRESENTATION: “Step-by-Step Mobile Marketing” with Wilson Mattos & Dan Hollings, Thurs, May 5th @ 3pm EDT

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And it wasn’t just Danny noticing. SEOs from all over the Web had seen significant changes to their organic traffic, but this important algorithm shift had no label until Danny called it the “Farmer” update in his SearchEngineLand.com blog.

Yet, when Google admitted to the update (which affected nearly 12% of all pages in the U. S.), they decided that they’d rather call it “Panda,” because it was more “friendly” and because they didn’t want people to think that they were specifically targeting content farms.

But they were targeting content farms and more. And thousands of websites immediately lost their traffic and were scrambling to figure things out.

Some major sites were affected by Panda, too. Suite101.com, for example, lost 94% and EzineArticles.com lost 90% of their organic traffic. There was no doubt that the devastation was a crushing blow to sites using only “duplicate” rather than the original content that Google wants to see.

That’s not to say that your site will be penalized if it holds some duplicate content. But if it’s ALL duplicate content or content “scraped” from other sites, you’ll want to pay close attention…

If your site was affected, you may have noticed a significant drop in organic traffic since the end of February. You can also check your positions in Google Webmaster Tools, and see if keyword positions have radically changed over the past 30 days.

But if your investigation proves that the Panda has bitten you, don’t worry. You can get your rankings back. Here are five things you can do to improve your image with Google:

1. Remove any pages with “scraped” content.

Content that you didn’t create yourself, such as article reprints or blog “excerpt” posts with no original content added to back those up. Even very large sites with just a few such pages are feeling the bite, so if you think your site is too big to be bothered, you may want to think again.

2. Keep outside advertising to a minimum.

It’s OK to have one or two ads on a page with a significant amount of content, but if you have a site where the ads outweigh the content or your site looks like a used car lot with streamers, banners, and blinking ads everywhere, get rid of that stuff! It’s going to hurt you.

3. Be sure that your customers have a way to contact a human being.

If you’re writing a blog, be sure to respond to your comments. If your site is an e-commerce site, a membership site, or a stand-alone website, be sure that people have a way to contact you or at least your support department by mail, email, and telephone. Live chat isn’t a bad idea, either. Google wants to see human interaction or at least the potential for it.

4. Do everything you can to get traffic.

Send social media outlets to your blog or web page, use paid media buys, do whatever it takes to get people interested in your site because Google wants to see some traffic coming in and they are counting your “authority” in social arenas, too.

5. Get quality backlinks. Don’t buy them — ever.

Google hates that. But you can guest post on other blogs in your niche, or submit to quality directories like DMOZ, Yahoo, or JoeAnt.com, for example. (Just be sure that the directory is human edited or it won’t count.)

Though Google ins’t the only search engine on the block, it still gets the most traffic and will give you the best results if you optimize for it. Take some time now to figure out whether the Panda has bitten you, and then follow the steps above.

The bottom line is… Give Google the quality, unique content that it wants because there’s nothing more valuable than the bucket loads of targeted, free, converting traffic that Google supplies.

Take care of Google and it will most definitely take care of you.

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SEO SECRET SAUCE

Still worried about Panda?

Here are more steps you can take to can improve your rankings, whether or not your site was bitten by the bear:

1) Care about your visitors –

The overall user experience is important, not just to Google but to your customers. Be sure that your site design and usability are set to “easy,” keep ad-to-content ratio low, and work on brand perception. Keep your brand in their minds and on your pages. If you’re already there… Great! You’re doing the right things.

2) Are you concentrating on awareness?

After ensuring all content on your site is high quality, be sure to consider your engagement with customers through social media channels. Promote your brand awareness with Facebook pages and Twitter. Work toward achieving “authority” in social media sites by getting as many Retweets and Likes as possible. Focus on your customers’ experience interacting with your company. Let them know that there are real people behind it.

3) Have one kind of advertising, not several…

If you have a site or blog running AdSense, Kontera (or other link advertising), and banners, choose one form of advertising and stick to that. Too many forms just ring Google’s bell and could hurt your chances for higher rankings.

And if you’re already doing these things? Celebrate! You have appeased the ghods of Google.

Is your site up to snuff or what can you do to improve it?

Let us know with your comments below!

Stompernet Blog

Should Google's new "Caffeine" technology be keeping YOU up at night?

Hey Stompers,

As you may have heard, Google recently announced testing of a new, more powerful version of their search engine technology.

It’s code-named “Caffeine” and you can read about from Google’s own Dev Blog here.

Now, as business people who rely on SEO, any time Google gives us some insights into what they have planned for the future, we need to pay attention.

So what can we learn from what Google is telling us about the future of search?  Here’s a quote I think is particularly telling:

“It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

I think that one sentence tells us all we need to know about where we need to be moving, and here’s how:

1. Size and Indexing Speed: This tells us that Google is going to be crawling more pages and indexing them FASTER.  This continues Google’s focus on fresh content – so many new pages are created every day, they can’t keep up.

2. Accuracy: This indicates that the sites that will continue to “win” the search game are going to be the ones that can correctly match up the searcher’s keywords with the content they were actually looking for.  Google indicates that they’re interested not only in what sites people click on, but what the searcher’s behavior is once they arrive.

With that in mind, success will come from testing and adjusting your pages to better serve your visitors.  It will no longer be enough to focus on the keywords alone, but on actually making your content relevant to what those searchers want.

One way to do this is through careful organization of your site structure, organizing information in ways that people will find useful, not just search spiders.

3. Comprehensiveness: To me, this indicates that Google will continue to heap love upon “authority” sites – ones that do a really good job of completely covering their selected niche.

In Google’s never-ending quest for relevance, Google wants to see sites that can indicate a thorough and comprehensive resource for what people are searching for.  This is why it’s important to continue to build pages that rank for ALL your relevant keywords.

It’s not just about the individual SERPS, but the “profile” that a comprehensive site creates.  I can imagine that this focus could be partly to combat “SERP Spamming” tactics where results are flooded with multiple, largely identical copies of the same information spread across multiple Web 2.0 sites.

More and more, it’s going to be important to create sites with larger and larger collections of content in order to really dominate the listings.

Once again, Google shows that they prefer larger, older sites that are packed with useful information.

So even though there’s been a lot of buzz around this announcement and lots of speculation, I don’t think you need to change too much if you’re already doing your SEO the StomperNet way.  What’s working in Google now for us appears to be exactly what they want to encourage.  In fact, they want MORE of it, FASTER.

So get started today, so by the time Caffeine comes out of BETA, you’ll be so far ahead of your competition they may never be able to catch up.

Here’s Hoping, and Keep Stomping!

Brad Fallon
CEO
StomperNet.com

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Don’t those SEO “wizards” seem to have a crystal ball peering into Google’s inner workings?  How do they know when Google starts dancing before anyone else can even hear the music yet?

Well Dan’s going to tell you how you can get on Google’s not-so-secret “Insider’s List” so you get an email whenever they change the algorithm.  It’s really that simple.  (Yes, really.)

Stompernet Blog

– Leslie Rohde, GoingNaturalSix Video #2 – “Referential Integrity Rocks!”

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Stompernet Blog

IMPORTANT: This post is all about answering a bunch of the questions that we’ve gotten about our last two videos. There is a LOT of serious MEAT in this post, so PLEASE be sure to read the LAST QUESTION. There’s a rumor that’s started up, and it’s important that I squash that rumor right now.

Plus there’s a bit of a hint of some VERY cool stuff that I’ll be releasing very soon.

But first -

Holy Moly! We are receiving an amazing avalanche of feedback here on the StomperBlog from the “Double Your Traffic” and “Destroy Duplicate Content” videos.

I’m very grateful to everyone, and humbled by all the praise.

(What?! I can be humble! Sometimes!)

But along with the praise, you guys sent along your questions and your requests for clarification. That’s just GREAT for me, because that means you’re watching the videos, and you “get” them. That’s what StomperNet is all about. We want to make this stuff not only understandable, but we want to make it EASY. We also love interactivity and feedback.

The more you guys post your questions and comments, the better we can find the sticking points and get you un-stuck. Success is going to come with taking action, and you can’t pick up the ball and run with it if you have questions about the play book, right?

That’s why I’ve taken a break from working on the next video to reply to some of the more pressing questions we’ve gotten.

Now, you’ve probably noticed that I often reply directly to the comments here. However, I thought these questions below brought up particularly important points, and I wanted to make sure I got them in front of everyone who can use them, rather than just posting into the comments.

Before I get to the Q&A, I want to officially ask for even MORE questions and concerns! We really do read them, and as you can see here, we’ll try our best to remove any obstacle on your own path to success!

Without further ado, it’s answer time:

Q. You said that “Your chosen domain name has little to no affect on your SERPs”. Well, I have to dis that – at least two of my sites have top rankings almost solely because of their chosen domain names. Maybe you were meaning something else and I just misheard. – Chris

A. Hi Chris, great question. You know what’s funny? I already kind of answered it accidentally in the same video! You remember later in the video when I gave you the trick about keyword stuffing your URLs so your articles will link back to you with your keywords? The same principle is what’s at work when we’re talking about keyword-rich
domain names.

It’s true that your domain name has no REAL effect on your SERPS.

BUT if you have a domain name which contains your target keywords, when people use your URL as the text to link to you, you’ll start to rank for those words. This happens for the exact same reason it works in the article bio box example I gave in the video. Hope that clears things up for you and anyone else who might have got confused on that point.

Q. …One observation on making the text an image file on your example site on the mortgage disclaimer. Why is that better to do than just placing that text on a separate page – linking to it – and then blocking that folder or file to that page in your robots.txt file?

This will keep the search engine spiders from spidering that page and therefore will see no duplicate content as well. – Chad

A. Another great question, Chad. The key to that answer lies in the question itself. In the mortgage industry, you need disclaimers on every single page for legal reasons. For that example, the image disclaimer with the alt tags is the best solution, because that info NEEDS to be on every page or you’ll get in big trouble.

If you aren’t in an industry that has such requirements, your example is the recommended solution. In fact, that’s the most common way people handle Terms of Service and Privacy Policies. So there’s your answer!

Q. I was a bit confused about the title tags, after removing the stop words, then what? Do you need totally different words in each title, or is a certain percentage of similarity acceptable to mother Google? – Ronald

A. Let me eliminate your confusion Ronald. There’s no target percentage for your title tags, necessarily. It depends on how much content you have on your pages. For example, if the pages on your site are short on content, then your title tags will need to be significantly different.

However, if your pages have a lot of content on them, it’s less important that your title tags be unique. The more total content on the page, the less you have to worry about title tags. However, you should still make each one unique if you can, since it’s a good practice.

Your title tags are displayed in the SERPs, so it’s an opportunity to communicate with your visitors before they hit your site. Take that opportunity and tell them exactly what they can expect when they visit you.

Q. Just wondering, how do you avoid duplicate content in blogs, where different ‘pages’ are created on the fly using existing content? Eg: there may be multiple category or tag ‘pages’ where the same few posts appear… – Rob

A. Rob, this is similar to what I stated above. It’s not necessarily a problem that you have repetitive content on your blog, as these different blog page templates will arrange that content in different ways. Whether it’s a factor in your rankings or not depends on how frequently you update your blog, and how long your posts are. Here’s the way to tell if it’s a factor or not.

Simply take a look at your different “pages”: Home page, Category page, Post Page, etc. How unique is the content on each page? If you’re posting frequently enough, and with enough content in each post, each of those pages should be significantly different – more than enough to avoid being seen as duplicates. If the pages look too similar, tweak your templates. Show more posts on the homepage, or show only post excerpts in you categories, rather than full posts. Those should help make the pages as unique as possible.

Q. What would you think about (on smaller sites) going to the trouble of changing the alt tags on the template images that repeat on every page to contribute to page uniqueness? Or would this seem like manipulation to the search engines since they could probably determine the image file names aren’t changing on each page, just the alt text? – Brad

A. This one’s going to depend on your site also, Brad. I don’t think there’s a danger of the search engines seeing this as manipulation, but it takes away the benefit of having a template in the first place, and seems like a lot of work to me. The “smarter” way to overcome your template duplication is by adding more unique content to each page, and leaving the template alone.

As I recommend in the video, make the percentage of content text on the page exceed the percentage of template text and you should have no penalties for duplication. Plus, rather than spending your time changing alt text (which your visitors will most likely never see) you’ll be spending your time creating more unique content (which your visitors AND the search engines LOVE)!

This one’s from a StomperNet member!

Q. I wish G would allow me to push a third page… or would that be the death-knell of the double and turn it into an authority site which I would gather does not convert as well? – Anthony

A. To tell the truth, we don’t know exactly why or how Google decides to make an authority site listing. However, based on what we DO know, we don’t think it’s related to the multiple listings or indents. Is it possible to get two indents on the same results page? I’ve never seen it. Is it possible to have an authority site listing AND another page from the same site on a results page?

Yes!

We’ve seen this happen, but we’re still testing to figure out how this happens and how to do it on purpose. I want to add a note about conversion as well. We don’t have enough data to speak with certainty about whether authority listings convert better or worse than regular indents. However, the authority listings take up a LOT of screen real estate, and will push your competitors farther down the page.

Who doesn’t like that?

And here’s the last one – and I bet almost every single one of you had this question in the back of your mind…

LAST IMPORTANT QUESTION:

Q. What are you guys hinting at launching? Jeff Walker and Frank Kern just don’t start blasting out emails over free stuff. – Richard

A. I’ve started getting lots of comments and questions about what’s coming. It seems that some people think that GN 2.0 is just a build up to me opening SN back up again.

Let me squash that rumor right now. SN has been closed since last May, and this is NOT a build up to me re-opening SN.

I am honored to call Frank Kern and Jeff Walker friends of mine, and they are definitely on my cell phone speed dial – but you’re right, Richard.

Those guys didn’t just mail out about my GN 2.0 videos for nothing.

You see, we DO have something coming. And it’s going to happen VERY fast so you need to pay attention.

I will have more details in just a couple of days, but right now I can tell you this – we are about to launch a piece of software that will *almost* magically increase your web sites conversion. And I’m not talking about something cheesy that puts some gimmick popup or something on your site.

I have literally spent TENS of thousands developing this tool – it’s not rocket science, but it’s pretty darn close. This software let’s you zero in on your web site and pinpoint exactly where site is leaking profits. You just plug those profit leaks, and watch what happens to your bottom line. It’s that simple.

Now I know you are used to these huge super-expensive product launches, and you’re probably a little worried about sticker shock when we release this thing. After all, it seems like there’s another $2000 or $3000 product released every week.

Well, I want to be clear here – I know with it being Christmas time a lot of people are a bit tight on cash… and since it IS the season of giving and generosity.

I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised when we launch this software tool.

But FIRST – I’m going to release another video, and it’s about optimizing your site in a way I have NEVER seen taught anywhere before.

If you thought my first two GN 2.0 videos were groundbreaking – well, reserve your judgement until you see this.

Hope everyone is having a great holiday so far, and we’ll talk again super-soon!

Stay Tuned,
Andy Jenkins

P.S. If you’ve had a question about either of our videos, PLEASE post to the comments! We’re checking it all day every day, and that’s your best bet to get your question answered. And of course, even if you don’t have a question, we’ll accept compliments and praise as well. What? I said I CAN be humble. Just not right now.

P.P.S. I’ll also have more details about the software we’ll be launching in just a few days, so watch your inbox, watch the StomperBlog, and if you haven’t – Watch the “Double Your Traffic” and “Destroy Duplicate Content” videos AGAIN! Don’t just watch – put those tactics into action today.

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Stompernet Blog

Wow! We’ve gotten an incredible response to the new Going Natural 2.0 video we released last week, and I want to thank everyone who sent comments and feedback. Based on some of that excellent feedback, I’m pleased to announce our second video in the Going Natural 2 series: “Destroying Duplicate Content”.

Now, last time, I showed you how you can increase the number of listings you have in the SERPs. This time, we’re changing gears and I’m going to show you how you can avoid being BANNED from the search engines.

I think this is some KILLER stuff. In fact, maybe we should rename the series to “Going Medieval”…

Anyway, we hope you love it.

If you haven’t already, you can see the video here.

If you’ve already watched the new video, we mention “SEO Stop Words” – We’ve provided a list of them below.

Special thanks to Jerry West, StomperNet Faculty Member for providing the resource above. Please Copy and Paste for your own use.

In Future Going Natural 2.0 Videos, we’re going to show you:

• How to Get # 1 in Google
• How to Double Your Conversion on your Current Web Site
• How we used Video to Generate Almost $1,000,000 of additional Sales in eCommerce
• How to Unravel the Mysteries to MASSIVE TRAFFIC almost instantly using the cutting edge techniques in Social Media and Social Marketing

So, subscribe at the top left, and keep an eye on your inbox for upcoming videos and an AWESOME ANNOUNCEMENT we’ll be making right before Christmas! Don’t miss out on getting first notice on all these upcoming vids, and our special holiday gift for you!

AJ

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Stompernet Blog

1. Internet Mumpreneurs Posted December 9, 2007 at 3:19 am

   Hey Andy! I followed the instructions in your (very cool) video and AFTER 3 DAYS I checked today and there it is! I got my double listing in Google.

   To top it all off the original page had only been in google for one week prior, and now both listings (after 2 weeks) have the 1st and 2nd spot on the 2nd page of google for the key phrase I was targeting.

   For another keyphrase, the new page actually beats the first one to the 1st page of google!

   What can I say, how the hell do I find out more!!

   Andy, you rock!

   Leigh

Leigh, this is how you find out more… Just STAY TUNED. We’ll have another Going Natural 2.0 Video released the week of December 10th.

3 Days. AWESOME.

If you haven’t already, WATCH “How To Double Your Traffic” and TAKE ACTION.

AJ

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Stompernet Blog

…or was it a rude awakening?

Maybe you should decide.

Last week a blogger had the nerve to call me out publically – I decided that maybe he was right (OUCH!).

Go watch this video and decide for yourself.

Then come back here. Take your best shot at me. Or maybe you want to tell me how great I am for giving you this killer content.

I’ll let you decide. The gauntlet has been dropped!

And best of all – there’s more video to come – so stay tuned.

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Stompernet Blog