A lot of people talk about directories and their relative value in terms of the directories PR on the homepage. Whilst this can be an important factor when looking to buy links on homepages in ninety-nine out of a hundred cases, your link won’t be appearing on the homepage. As we said earlier one of the things the SE spiders evaluate is the page the link is on and we also said you can control this.
Directories are, in general, built on three or more tiers. Some of the bigger directories (eg., DMOZ) can have up to 12 tiers. Naturally if the homepage is a PR3 by the time you get down to the fourth tier, it probably doesn’t have any PageRank and it’s for this reason that unless you are buying homepage links the PR of the directory isn’t that important. What is however far more important is the page on which your link will appear.
Taking the example of a Madrid website the site has been optimized for a series of keywords, the link is optimized for this keyword and the description has been written around these keywords. Therefore its only natural that the link should be submitted to a page written around the same keywords.
Assuming that the Tier 4 page is about City Breaks and the Tier 5 page about Madrid and both pages have zero PR then the keyword benefits of appearing on a related Tier 5 page outweigh the Tier 4 page.
Now assuming that the tier 4 page is about Spain and the Tier 5 page about Madrid and both pages have zero PR then in this case the Tier 4 page is better as it is about one of the keywords if not the main one. Here there is a risk though as directory owners normally insist that sites applying for free links apply to the lowest category possible. Although a judgement call I would be inclined to err on the side of caution and submit to the Madrid page instead of the Spain page as it would be better to have one link than none at all!
For free links directory owners are loathe to take the time moving sites to their correct category so get it right for them and you’ll be far more likely to be approved. As an illustration of the work of a directory owner a PR0 free directory will receive approximately a hundred submissions each day. The higher the PR the more submissions it will receive.
Recap:
Do:
- Evaluate the categories for the greatest keyword communality with your site.
- Submit to the category that best suits your site.
Do not:
- Blindly follow the PR of a directory’s homepage as 9 times out of 10 internal pages don’t have PR.
Varying Submissions
Varying your submissions gives you a far greater chance of being accepted into directories. As we said earlier directories want more and more content for greater long tail searches from the SE’s. Many directory owners don’t just own one directory but normally have many more. There are some that run over a hundred directories but these are the exception rather than the rule. However with multiple directories under the control of the same person this person isn’t going to want to see the same site requesting a free link with the same title and description from five different directories at the same time. Your site may be approved in the 1st 2nd and maybe even the third directory but pretty soon alarm bells will be ringing and the rest of the time invested in submitting to the remaining directories will be lost.
Apart from the obvious problem with the directory owners, SE robots will greatly devalue a link if they find it always has the same text and description around it. Now imagine a page in directory about Madrid that has 10 links all submitted by their webmasters and all using the same title and description that the webmasters used for every other submission. The SE’s are going to see that page as being duplicate content and penalize it and maybe the whole directory. With some of the better directories, you’ll actually find that your description has been edited slightly before being approved. This is actually a good thing and causes you to benefit more rather than less.
Our advice to circumvent these problems is to come up with five or six different titles and descriptions each time you do a directory submission campaign. For example, every 500 directories. By changing and varying the descriptions and titles you use, there is both a far greater chance of acceptance and a far greater chance of the SE’s seeing your link as being genuine and not duplicate content. This also applies equally to link trades and exchanges you do.
Recap:
Do:
- Use multiple descriptions and titles.
- Vary the combination of descriptions and titles
Do not:
- Submit the same title and description over and over again.