When I wrote my article “Internet directories – waste of time”, I didn’t waited enough as it takes several months from Google to show the effect of your linking strategy rather than few weeks I expected when I wrote it.
So from those efforts I was in top page after few months and enjoyed the 27% new visitor sign up rate which only lasted few months. As new members are making new pages and Google likes fresh content, I lost my selected keyword positions replaced by keywords taken from new members profiles.
Meanwhile I started my own directory as well.
I have been surprised how much Idiots nowadays are claiming to be SEO experts without any knowledge of the topic. Here are some examples of this kind of bullshit:
- There has been lot of claims that Google’s algorithms are secret formula like Coca-Cola. Google’s algorithms are public information since its birth and can be found by performing simple Google search. How can you declare yourself to be “Google expert” when you are so incompetent that you can’t perform a simple Google search?
- There is no proof that number of characters in the page linking to your site has effect for your site page rank. So why claim that writing SEO articles is better strategy than directory submissions? Sure, a good keyword rich article could get high SERP and send you extra visitors. For example that happened to my article in my blog when I launched my Free Online Dating Community site being on top of key phrase “Free Online Dating Community”
- Page rank with those numbers between 0-10 does not have much effect to your SERP positions. That’s why it’s even has been removed from Google webmasters tools. For example, before I started my directory submissions, I had PR2. When I ended this process the Page Rank was decreased to PR1 but my site was again first page listed using selected keywords what I used in back link anchor texts.
- Tested that links with NOFOLLOW attribute still counts for Google. They are then showing up in my Google Webmasters Account and Google is showing key phrases from those links so I was able to be in Top of seraches using a phrase I used in NOFOLLOW links.
- Much more interesting has been claims Google penalizing something. When you login to your Google webmasters account, you should see it in red “because… your site has been excluded from index”. I haven’t ever seen messages regarding “duplicate content” or much better claim “because you have built too many back links in too short period of time”. If “duplicate content” matters, none of the sites running on WordPress never will show up because WordPress is making different URL’s for same content by categories and tags to index.
Anyway, my first idea to start a directory was to get my money out from Google Adsense account. I had little bit over $40 and assuming to get high traffic directory, I could reach easily to $100 necessary to cash a check. However, this never happened. The CTR for Google ads in my directory is around 0.01% earning me few cents per each click.
But compared to other free directories, my directory is sending real visitors to those who are listed there and the number of those listed sites could get is currently only 5-10 per month. So I changed the algorithm that sites in each category are listed by popularity (eq. number of clicks / number of days listed) which was part of the original search engine algorithms before Google introduced Page Rank
At least my other sites have got more visitors from my directory than Bing and Yahoo are sending. I’m not much convinced Microsoft sales person’s pitches how intelligent Bing is by showing local restaurants when you type “Sushi” being in Barcelona. My experiences are that Bing will be invoked when I make a spelling mistake or there are DNS issues when I try to reach my sites. Bing hasn’t ever showed my sites up as a result of my own URL. At least Google is much more intelligent than Bing.
Anyway, I have used over a 200h of my time to test directories out from thousands, have several sites up in Google with targeted keywords and compiled a of those that have worked for me for you to use.
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