4 things to consider before submitting your site to web directories

We’ll know how important it’s to have as many as quality links from different websites to your site and most of us tend to rely on directory submission to get back links from high PR directories and its pages. But you should know that submitting your site to every directory doesn’t really help you in gaining more PR or any kind of benefit. Why? - Because, search engines have started to scrutinize web directories and their website inclusion process. The chances of a web directory getting penalized is very high when it doesn’t follow certain quality guidelines and hence your backlinks could be considered paid text links.

For the benefit of those who are interested in submitting their websites to various directories hoping to get some link love from search engines, here are 4 major points that you should consider before you decide to submit your website to a directory.

1. Does the directory accept paid submission? If a web directory accepts paid submission, that is, you pay the directory certain amount of money to get listed in their pages, someday that directory could get banned from search engines and you will stop receiving any kind of benefit from your listing in that directory. Why? - Because there could be no quality guidelines that the web directory might follow to list your website for a fee, wherein that fee is not used to main the software, web servers, payment to people who manually review a site etc. It could be just a money making directory but not a directory of genuine websites having good content.

2. Does the directory require a compulsory backlink if they list your website in their directory? If yes - This MAY be ok to a certain extent. But if a directory lists all sorts of websites and require a backlink before a site is listed its pages, think again. Such directories are only looking at getting as many as sites listed in its pages to get more backlinks and then use the traffic to make a lot of money. They could get banned any day in future. And since you are linking out to them, you may also suffer the penalty to a certain extent.

3. Are there any quality guidelines that the web directory follows to list a website? Is there a manual inclusion process or links are automatically placed in the directory? There are tons of directories on Internet which accepts websites from online/offline tools and that too without any kind of manual review of the website submitted, so, every site that’s submitted is listed. Such directories do not really offer any benefit to you in short/long term. Think again!

4. Consider the quality of URLs in the directory before you submit your website for getting listed in it. Lookup the category and sub-category in which you want to list your website and then browse the links of those websites that are already listed there. Check to see if those websites have good content and are genuine. There is not point in getting listed in a directory that consists of only low quality links despite manual review process.

I am sure, SEO experts might add more points to the list above. If you have something to say, please write in the comments sections below and share your thoughts.
[tags]Directory Submission, Internet, Search Engine, SEO[/tags]