My Thoughts On Directories

I’m sure all of you know that directory submission is like Online Marketing 101. No, let me take that back. Online Marketing 100. It doesn’t even deserve that extra 1 at the back. It’s so basic and all new webmasters should exploit this to initiate those search engine spiders to crawling all of your site.

Every day, I try to do about 10 submits to new directories that pop up here and there for more of the newer sites. This takes me at maximum, about 15 minutes, so I don’t have much problems with it. However, I also do buy manual directory submissions ranging from 100~5,000 submissions ranging across various PRs to keep the back links increasing.

Awkwardly though, just a few minutes ago, it struck me that maybe I was wasting a lot of time. After all, isn’t time = money? Let me explain to you why.

Assuming that you don’t have a quick routine that I use to get the sites submitted manually (you can ditch the auto way as that’s unethical in my opinion), the entire process can take quite a while depending on how many sites you have. Now, couldn’t you use that time in a better way to actually promoting your site aggressively through other means? If not, how about producing some content? Directory submissions, in my opinion, may just not be as great as it seem to be.

Most Directories Suck

I was a directory owner a few years ago, and I’ll be honest with you. Most directories suck because the owners aren’t exactly big promoters of their directories. Take a group of a random 100 directory owners. See how many of them consider their directories as their biggest projects. More than likely, not one will consider their directories as their biggest projects, considering the number of newborn directories out there.

Directories >= Link Farms?

I’m sure you know how link farms are just slapped by Google. Other search engines don’t like them. I don’t like them. You don’t like them. I don’t want this blog to be listed beside a real estate blog as much as that real estate blog doesn’t want to be listed beside mine. Why? The niches are completely different. Same thing with most directories these days.

How many times do you see a specialized directory accepting a certain niche? Not so often. Same with RSS directories, bidding directories–you name it! Most will have the “General” tag on them. Isn’t this just a nice way of organizing your link farms? Sure there are super quality general directories, but also see if they accept all sites. They don’t–they have some standard.

The Lifespan

How many times do we see random domain names used to build directories? Nearly all the time. Chances are, these directories built on random domain names are bound to have a short lifespan. Wouldn’t you be mad if you spent all day submitting to 500 directories. You check the next week and see that 100 of them just got deleted?

End of Ranting

I’ll stop my ranting here to separate my post now. I think I’ll write a Part 2 on this matter on finding some solutions for us helpless directory submitters. Whoo… this was a short post. Just blazed by it.

Anyways, let me know what you think. Are you just as upset as me on how this directory niche is headed towards?