SEO For Dummies, 6th Edition (2016)
Part III. Adding Your Site to the Indexes and Directories
Chapter 14. Submitting to the Directories
In This Chapter
Knowing why search directories are important
Submitting to the top search directories
Finding specialized directories
Locating second-tier directories
In Chapter 13, you look at getting your site into the search engines. In this chapter, you look at getting your site into the search directories. Submitting to directories can be a great way to get links.
The world’s most important directory recently closed down, and the other major directory is incredibly frustrating to work with, even though it’s free. However, you may find lots of other, smaller directories you may want to register with.
Pitting Search Directories Against Search Engines
Before you start working with directories, it’s helpful to know a few basics about what directories are — and aren’t:
· Directories don’t send searchbots out onto the Web looking for sites to add (though they may send bots out to make sure that the sites are still live).
· Directories don’t read and store information from Web pages within a site.
· Because directories don’t read and store information, they don’t base search results on the contents of the Web pages.
· Directories don’t index Web pages; they index Web sites. Each site is assigned to a particular category. Within the categories, the directory’s index contains just a little information about each site — not much more than a URL, a title, and a description. The result is a categorized list of Web sites — and that’s really what the search directories are all about.
A few years ago, Yahoo! was based around its directory. In fact, Figure 14-1 shows an example of what Yahoo! looked like early in 1998 (courtesy of a wonderful service called the Wayback Machine at www.archive.org).
Figure 14-1: The main Yahoo! page, when Yahoo! Directory was what it was all about.
The idea behind Yahoo! was a categorized directory of Web sites that people could browse. You could click links to drill down through the directory and find what you needed, similar to flipping through a Yellow Pages directory. Although you could use the search box to peruse categories, site titles, and site descriptions, the tool was nothing like the Yahoo! search index of today, which can hunt for your term in billions of Web pages.
But Yahoo! made an enormous mistake. In fact, the image in Figure 14-1 is from a time when Yahoo! was at its peak, a time when most of the world’s Web searches were carried out through Yahoo.com — just a few months before Google began full operations. Yahoo! evidently hadn’t realized the weaknesses of the directory system until it was too late. These weaknesses include the following:
· Directories provide no way for someone to search individual pages within a site. The perfect fit for your information needs may be sitting somewhere on a site that is included in a directory, but you won’t know it because the directory doesn’t index individual pages.
· Categorization is necessarily limited. Sites are rarely about a single topic; even if they appear to be, single topics can be broken down into smaller subtopics. By forcing people to find a site by category and keyword in a very limited amount of text — a description and title — the directories are obviously very restrictive.
· Hand-built directories are necessarily limited in size. Hand-built directories, such as Yahoo! Directory and the Open Directory, add a site to their directories only after a real live human editor has reviewed the site. With hundreds of millions of Web sites, a human-powered system can’t possibly keep up.
· Hand-built directories get very dated. Directories often contain some extremely old and out-of-date information that simply wouldn’t be present in an index that is automatically recompiled continually. (Yahoo! spidered the sites — that is, sent out searchbots to look through the sites — in its index for broken links and dead sites, but if the site’s purpose had changed, Yahoo! didn’t always notice.)
The proof of directories’ weaknesses is in the pudding: Google took over and now is the dominant search system on the Web. (To be fair, Yahoo! helped Google by integrating Google results into Yahoo! searches, although in the summer of 2004, it dropped Google and began using its own index — then in 2010, Yahoo! dropped its own index and began using Bing’s data.)
In fact, Yahoo! no longer even has a directory — it closed the directory late in 2014.
Why Are Directories So Significant?
If Yahoo! Directory has closed, and if most people have never heard of the world’s second most important directory (the Open Directory Project at www.dmoz.org), why do you care about them? They may be useful — though far less so than they were in the past — for a number of reasons:
· Links in directories help provide context to search engines. If your site is in the Recreation: Pets: Rodents category in the Open Directory Project, for instance, the search engines know that the site is related to playing with rodents. The directory presence helps search engines index your site and may help your site rank higher for some search terms. Last time I looked, Google still had almost three million Open Directory Project pages indexed.
· Links, as you see in Chapters 16 through 18, are very important in convincing search engines that your site is of value. It’s sometimes possible to get links from hundreds of search directories, on pages indexed by the major search engines.
· The Open Directory Project feeds results to other Web sites; at one point hundreds of other sites. Now, not so many. A link from the Open Directory Project may show up as a link indexed on some other sites, too.
The Open Directory Project used to be a force to reckon with. Data from this system was widely spread across the Internet and has been used by major search systems. Yahoo!, for instance, once used data from the Open Directory Project, and until 2011 even Google maintained a directory (at http://dir.google.com), based on Open Directory Project data (which, incidentally, is owned by AOL/Netscape).
Submitting to the Search Directories
Chapter 13 has what some may find an unusual message: “Sure, you can submit to the search engines, but it may not do you any good.” Search engines really like links to your site, and having links to your site is often the best way to get into the search engines.
However, the search directories won’t find you unless you submit to them. And you can forget automated submission programs for many directories; submissions must be entered into the Open Directory Project by hand, for example.
Submitting to the Open Directory Project
Yes, the Open Directory Project is free, and yes, you can submit very quickly. But the problem is that there’s no guarantee that your site will be listed. I’ve seen sites get into the Open Directory Project within a week or two of submission, and I’ve seen others that waited months — years! — without ever getting in. Additionally, the submission forms sometimes don’t seem to work. Unfortunately, the Open Directory Project — DMOZ, as it’s known to search geeks — has more work to do than volunteer editors to do it (each submission has to be reviewed), and although it invites people to become editors, its editor-recruiting process actually discourages editors. Consequently, it’s hard to get into the directory.
But don’t give up yet. A listing in the Open Directory Project is a great thing to have if you can get it. As I tell my clients, submitting takes only a few minutes, so you might as well try, even if the chance of getting in is low. It’s like a free lottery ticket. Here’s how to submit:
1. Read the editor’s guidelines at http://dmoz.org/guidelines/describing.html.
If you know what guidelines the editors use, you may be able to avoid problems. It’s hard to get into the directory, so you may as well give yourself the best chance of getting in.
2. Go to www.dmoz.org.
The Open Directory Project home page appears.
3. Find a suitable category for your site.
4. Click the Suggest URL link at the top of the page.
5. Follow the (fairly simple) directions.
You simply enter your home page’s URL, a short title, a 25 to 30-word description for the site, and your e-mail address. That’s it. Then you wait.
Nevertheless, understand that the editors at DMOZ don’t care about your site, they care about the directory. In fact, read the DMOZ forums at www.resource-zone.com, and you find that the attitude tends to be “tell us about your site, then go away and forget about it.” All sorts of factors are working against you:
· 8,000 editors are managing more than 700,000 categories.
· Many small directories might only be reviewed by an editor every six months — or far less frequently.
· The editors regard a six-month wait, or longer, not particularly excessive.
· In some cases, editors may even ignore submissions. As one editor explained, “There is no obligation to review them in any order nor is there a requirement to review them as a priority. Some editors find it more productive to seek out sites on their own and rarely visit the suggested sites.”
As another DMOZ editor succinctly explained it, DMOZ is “very much like a lottery.” The fact is, as important as DMOZ is, you may never get into this directory! If you really, really want to get in, you might consider posting in the DMOZ forums, where you can ask real, live DMOZ editors what’s going on www.resource-zone.com. Or do as a number of site owners have done; submit to DMOZ to become an editor. Once in, things get much easier! Still, I think that’s probably overkill these days, as the directory doesn’t have distribution it used to have.
Finding Specialized Directories
For just about every subject you can imagine, someone is running a specialized search directory. Although specialized directories get very little traffic when compared to the big guys, the traffic they do get is highly targeted — just the people you want to attract. Such directories are often very popular with your target audience.
Here’s an example of how to search for a specialized directory. Suppose that you’re promoting your rodent racing Web site. Go to Google and type rodent racing directory. Hmmm, for some reason, Google doesn’t find any directories related to rodent racing. Strange. Okay, try rodent directory. Now you’re getting somewhere! I did this search and found several useful sites:
· ThePetDirectory.us: You can advertise in this directory. A link would be nice, though I’m not sure it’s worth the price (sometimes it accepts free listings). I discuss that a little later in the section “You don’t have to pay.” (I don’t regard rodents as pets; racing rodents are working animals.)
· NetVet’s Electronic Zoo (http://netvet.wustl.edu): This is a big list of links to rodent-related sites, though mostly related to research (the Digital Atlas of Mouse Embryology and the Cybermouse Project, for instance). It’s got a good PageRank, too, PR6, so links from here would be valuable. And it’s on an .edu domain, which is valuable (see Chapter 16). Perhaps you can suggest that your site is related to research into cardiovascular performance of rodents under stress.
· Rodent Resources at the National Center for Research Resources: Hmmm, this is another rodent research site, but with an Alexa traffic rank of 357 and a PageRank of 8, getting listed in this directory would be very useful. (Maybe it’s time to apply for a research grant.) Also, because it’s at http://ncrr.nih.gov, which is a government domain, links would be valuable (see Chapter 16).
· The Rodent Breeders List (http://AltPet.net/rodents/breeder.html): This directory strikes me as one of those “not very pleasant, but somebody’s got to do it” things. (How do you breed rodents, anyway? Very carefully I assume.) Still, if you breed rodents for your races, you may want to get onto this list.
When you do a search for a specialty directory, your search results will include the specialty directories you need, but mixed in with them, you may also find results from the Open Directory Project. If you want, you can clear out the clutter by searching like this:
rodent directory - -inurl:dmoz.org
This search phrase tells Google to look for pages with the words rodent and directory but to ignore any pages that have dmoz.org (the Open Directory Project) in their URLs.
Finding directories through DMOZ
You can use other methods to track down specialty directories. In fact, as you get to know the Internet landscape around your business, you’ll eventually run into these directories. People mention them in discussion groups, for instance, or you find links to them on other Web sites.
I used to like browsing for these directories in the major directories — Yahoo! and the Open Directory Project. Of course, now the Open Directory is the only one of the two left. It has many directory subcategories, though. It doesn’t have one for rodent racing, which apparently gets no respect, but it certainly lists many directories in other categories.
To find directories in DMOZ is to go to the DMOZ.org and browse for suitable categories for your Web site. Each time you find a suitable category, search the page for the word directory to see if the page includes a link to a Web Directory or Directories subcategory. You can also use the search box; search for haunted houses directory, for example. You might also use synonyms; the term guide, for example, is a good one. DMOZ has a category called Society: Holidays: Halloween: Haunted Attractions: Guides and Directories, for example, in which it currently has links to eight such guides.
When you find a directory, see what’s in it. Don’t just ask for a link and move on. Dig around and see what you can find. The directory contains links to other sites that may also have their own directories.
Getting the link
After you’ve found a directory, you need to get the link back to your site. In some cases, you have to e-mail someone at the directory and ask. Many of these little directories are run by individuals and are often pretty crudely built. The problem you may run into is that it may take some time for the owner to get around to adding the link — after all, the directory is just a hobby in many cases.
Some directories have automated systems. Look for a Submit Your Site link, or maybe Add URL, Add Your Site, or something similar. The site may provide a form in which you enter your information. Some directories review the information before adding it to the directory, and in other, less common, situations, your information may post directly to the site.
By the way, some of these directories may ask you to pay to be added to the directory or give you preferential treatment if you pay.
Should you pay?
Generally, no.
Why not?
Look, it sometimes seems as though everyone’s trying to get you to pay these days. Every time you try to get a link somewhere, someone’s asking for money. For example, I recently ran across a portal with all sorts of directories that wanted me to pay $59 (regularly $99, though I’m not sure what or when regular is). That gets you into the index within seven days and gets you preferential placement.
Of course, that means this directory must have had listings over which I could have preferential placement; in other words, I could get in free. I scrolled down the page a little and found the free Basic Submission.
I recommend that you do not pay for these placements, at least to begin with. In most cases, they simply aren’t worth spending $60, $100, or more for the link. It’s worth spending a few moments getting a free link, though. If a site asks you to pay, dig around and see whether you can find a free placement link. If not, just move on. If the site can guarantee that you’ll be on a page with a high PageRank, the fee may be worth it. (See Chapter 16 for more information about PageRank.)
However, here’s another reason to be wary of paying for directory placements. Google has stated that if a directory adds some kind of value — if the payment is for review, not placement, so there’s a chance you won’t be accepted … that is, if the directory has the last say over the link text rather than simply accepting whatever keywords you request — then Google will accept the directory and give value to the links. If, on the other hand, the directory is a simple “pay us and you’re in, and by the way, which keywords do you want in your links” type of directory, it may regard the links as no better than purchased links. (See Chapter 17 for an explanation of why the search engines don’t like purchased links and what they do about it.)
At some point perhaps, it might be worthwhile to consider thinking about paying for such placements, but generally, only if you know that the site is capable of sending you valuable traffic or providing valuable links.
You don’t have to pay
Luckily, you may find that some of the best directories are free. Take, for instance, the model rocket business. Hundreds of model rocket sites, often run by individuals or families, are on the Web. (See the site shown in Figure 14-2.) Many of these sites have link pages. Although these sites don’t get huge numbers of visitors, they do get the right visitors (people interested in model rockets) and often have a pretty good PageRank. Most of these sites will give you a free listing, just for the asking. Look for a contact e-mail address somewhere.
Figure 14-2: It’s ugly and doesn’t get much traffic, but it does have a reasonable PageRank, and if you ask nicely, the site may give you a link. (It probably won’t give me a link now, but maybe you’ll get one.)
Using “Local” Directories
There are also many local directories — directories of businesses sorted geographically. These local directories are often good places to get listed. They’re easy to get into and can provide more site categorization clues for search engines, and they often have a high PageRank.
However, this is a subject on its own, so I cover it separately. See Chapter 12 for more information.