This is part one of two posts describing reasons why directory submission services should not be a part of your website marketing strategy. Submission services are online companies that you can pay a fee and they will submit your website to 100’s of web directories, along with 100’s of other sites. This service evolved from the demand for quick ways to obtain backlinks from other websites to your own, but there are many potential downfalls to the concept.

1. First of all, I have never understood the concept of paying someone else to submit your site to a web directory. I do understand the concept of saving time, but be careful when you place the fate of your online business in someone else’s hands. Be in control of your marketing strategy. The backlinks that you obtain will reflect back on your sites quality.

2. Links that are submitted by directory submission services usually just end up buried deep in the directory subcategories. You should be aware of where your link is placed. If you can’t find it, no one else can. Find prominent locations within the directory categories and see how many related sites are in your relevant category. Try to be listed within the first or second page. There are usually about 20 listings per page and there is little benefit to being listed as link number 381 in the Blogs category. No one will find your site unless they do a specific search, and they certainly will not sift through 19 pages to find link number 381. If your site category has too many listings, then take the time to evaluate whether you would like to upgrade to a featured listing or category sponsor.

3. Submitting unique content is the key to generating solid backlinks from directory submissions. Unfortunately, with submission services you only get to provide a handful of link titles and descriptions for your website, which results in duplicate content that will not return beneficial search engine results. Search engines will filter out all of the web pages that have your duplicate content and consolidate it into only one search engine result. So after paying for 50-100 submissions you receive at most a couple of search engine results, which is not cost effective advertising.

4. Quantity does not equal quality, or a higher pagerank. Your site will receive more benefit from acquiring natural backlinks from 100 high quality sites, as opposed to links from 1000 low quality link dumps. Those link dumps eventually contain many of the same sites and content, all coming from the same directory submission services. Backlinks from 1000 sites that have all the same content are worthless.

5. Backlinks have benefits, but you need to control where your links are being placed, especially when you are paying for the submission. Why do you want a link on a site that you have never visited? Most likely no one else plans on visiting the site, except for the submission service bots. A backlink is worthless if noone can find it, but I am speaking from the perspective of acquiring traffic, not pagerank.

Here is a link to one web directory that I do recommend. AvivaDirectory has been around a long time and the owner is regarded as one of the top webmasters in the directory industry.