Submitting your site to free directories is one of the easiest and cheapest (considering time and money if you outsource it) ways to get backlinks for your sites. These backlinks are good because you can choose your best suitable anchors, add some related text and keywords and have your site submitted to the correct subcategory to have it show up in a good company of similar sites. However most of these directories are new and many of the inner pages don’t get indexed, Google is also rumored to heavily reduce the weight of such links, but as any other links this can’t really hurt, but can frequently do a lot of good.
I recently bought 1k directory submissions for a bunch of new sites I had built this month at a cheap price through one of the service providers on DP. Usually I just do these for all my sites to help diversify the links and gets some decent new well anchored backlinks. There has been a lot of talk about how useful these actually are and many SEO’s consider them rather useless, which naturally can be understandable – these directories are usually new, have no or low pr and have tons of links to other sites to carry any significant seo weight.
However fact of the matter is it works for me! Some of my older and more established sites show the directory backlinks at the first pages of backlinks in yahoo explorer and I’ve seen how those links can help improve serps and get new sites indexed rather quickly. But this time it was rather extraordinary – one of those new sites already ranks on #5 for its main keyword and #9 for the secondary keyword – all within a week! These aren’t very competitive keywords, so it’s not a big deal to rank for them, but as everyone knows things are always different with new sites. It may take months before Google lets a new site out of the sandbox and into the first page of the serps.
I’ve noticed significant ranking improvements across several of the new sites after dir submissions. Obviously out of these 1,000 directories where my sites are supposedly submitted to only a few will approve and list them and out of those just few will get indexed to provide a valid backlink in Google. However even if it brings only a couple dozen backlinks it’s well worth the money to increase the links ip and site diversity and mix it up for Google.
Now if you’re wondering where to get these I usually just find the cheapest offer on here or here with some reviews and make a bulk order for 10-20 sites to 1000-2000 directories each. The regular pricing seems to be just about $12-15 per 1000 dir submissions, but you can get discounts and sometimes even better, higher privileged service when ordering in bulk. It’s also worth doing this for established sites every once in a while and be sure to choose different anchors for link diversity.
Too bad those ranking boosts will be gone within 4 weeks.
Not having any links and then having a ton of free directory links pop up is not what you want to be doing and was already given the kibosh in 2002.
in 2002 Google was only starting to gain popularity, there weren’t many directories back then 🙂
But you’re right here, doing only dir submissions is a poor strategy on its own, however with other different links mixed up it’s a good idea.