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100,000 Search Friendly Links for $1

Posted by Paul B | August 29, 2007 .

Everybody has seen an advert like this one (OK, maybe not quite as good as that one) where people will offer to submit your website to 1000, 10000, 100000 “Search Friendly” directories for a stupidly small fee. Has anybody ever actually bothered to review these services though? Well luckily for everybody I’ve used quite a few of these directory submission services and here’s the truth.

What Is Search Friendly

In directory terms I think them mean that

  1. The page has page rank
  2. The page does not have an excessive amount of outbound links (30 seems to be nice)
  3. The links are not disguised or no followed

What they don’t tell you however is that simply by creating a directory of non original link only content AND by offering a paid submission option (which almost all do) they are anything but search friendly.

But Do They Work

I would look at work as 3 things, some direct referral traffic, an increase in general search ranking performance, a positive effect on page rank. If you don’t see any or all of them then I’d say that this linking strategy is not working.

I can only go from my own personal experience, but in the 3 years I’ve been using various link services (ranging from manual submissions in Thailand to automatic large scale directory submission) I can honestly say that I’ve never once experienced any of the above factors. No direct referral traffic, no increase in search performance and no effect on page rank. Over that time I have clients who didn’t know any better spend hundreds of dollars (without consulting me first I must add) on these services which no positive effects, I’ve spent my own money to try and kick-start new websites and again no effect. For me and my clients it’s been like throwing money down the drain. There are several directories out there (the ODP, Yahoo directory) that are well known to have a positive effect on your website, there are a few more that do appear to be useful in terms of referral traffic but in general I wouldn’t waste my money on these services.

Prove Me Wrong

If you run one of these services and want to prove me wrong, then please be my guest. At present this blog gets around 60 unique visitors a day, has no page rank (although a 3-4 is predicted) and does very little in the natural search results. If you think your service can boost these stats then drop me an e-mail to close dot cowley at gmail dot com

You perform your magic on this site and if it works I’ll happily write a lovely review about your service and it’s positive effects. Not only that but I’ll recommend you to several existing and all future clients. If you can prove that you’ve got a directory submission service than can be of benefit then you’ll do very well out of this deal. My arms are crossed and I’m waiting here for somebody to prove me wrong.

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  1. Web Directories, Put Up Or Just Shut Up | Make Money Online With Paul Barlow UNITED STATES WordPress 2.2.1  September 5, 2007 10:17 am

    [...] place about web directories. It wasn’t all that long ago that I did a post about how ab-sol-ut-ely fricking useless they are in terms of any benefit they offer to webmasters. Well it appears as though thanks to the recent major slap on the face by Google to all worthless [...]