The arguments against bulk submission of your website to hundreds of general directories can be summarized in the following way:

1. Search engines will frown upon you getting 1,000 new links in one day.
2. The value of 1,000 directory links from general-topic sites is next to nothing.
3. Topical directories that are hand-edited will provide much more link-value, so you should spend resources on that instead.

I’d like to use an opportunity (or “crisi-tunity” if you’re a Simpsons fan) that’s recently come up for me to refute some of these claims. But first, let me refute #1 right away…

Rate of Change
When search engine spiders visit your webpage, there is a certain process that occurs. The spider reads the HTML of the page, probably makes a few statistical notes (# of words, # of links (internal and external), URL parameters used, dates on the page, etc.) and then puts it in the queue for analysis by a heavier-duty piece of software.

Your site gets put in the queue to be spidered in a few different ways: someone with a search-engine toolbar visits your site, someone links to your site, someone does a search for your specific URL. All of which give the site a different priority, depending on whether or not it’s in the index. Statistically speaking, this means that your site and my site are almost never being spidered simultaneously.

When you add in the fact that your page can’t be indexed until it goes through the indexing algorithSimpsons fanm (the heavy-duty software I referenced above) which can take a couple days, there is just no way for your new pages and mine to be added to the index at the same time.

Because links are an element of the page, they are “counted” in the same manner. When you spread this example across 1,000 sites, all with different indexing periods and rates there is just no way for a search engine to “see” you receiving hundred of links at the same time. They will appear to trickle in over the course of several weeks or months, especially when you consider the fact that not all the approvals go through at once either. I run several directories, and I only approve submissions once or twice a week.

There, #1 is officially dead, no?

The meat and potatoes
Last year a friend of mine was designing a brand new website for a company that sold promotional items. They were starting off with a brand new domain and wanted to get search engine traffic right away. Although my buddy asked me if I would help out, at the time I was confined by an agreement to only perform SEO for one company. So instead I hooked him up with a few tips on on-page optimization and a vendor who does directory submission.

Long story short the company ended up bailing on my friend after he delivered the site. They never paid him, so all that happened was the new site was built and live with on-page SEO basics, and it was submitted to 1,000 general-topic directories. One year later, the company has basically dissolved, but their site still stands (along with some analytics code I told my buddy to put on the site). Here’s what has materialized:

• The site now has a pagerank of 4 (from N/A at the start).
• The site shows 553 backlinks in Yahoo.
• The site is receiving about 20 visitors a day from Google.

So it seems that those links are neither worthless nor ignored. They have produced tangible results in 2 major search engines. Granted, this won’t make you a million dollars, but for a $50 “fire-and-forget” submission package, why wouldn’t you?

What I Advocate and Response to #3
With regard to topical web directories and finding the really strong ones to submit to, I fully encourage you to take advantage. There will never, ever be anything wrong with achieving a high-quality link, from a site that is topically-related to yours.

However, if you have a brand new site where you’re just trying to get some “air under the wings” (or you’re running an Advanced Domaining Strategy) why not spend a little cash to get things moving? You can (and should) always supplement this with topical link-building, but that kind of strategy means you need to know your business, which is something you (conceivably) can’t outsource.

So spend your time building quality links, and outsource the foundational stuff.

The Article Distribution Service iSnare.com has been billed as one of the best tools around to increase a website’s presence. And I’ve been a big proponent of it since I first came across the service.

The idea is simple enough: submit an article to this service, it is reviewed by humans for quality and then gets auto-distributed to 1000s of article-aggregation websites, many on general topics, and a few on whatever topic you choose for your article.

After using it a few times, I began to notice that pages I promoted with the service would tend to rise in Google’s SERPs for my targeted terms, and then slowly fall back down. They would usually settle at higher positions than where they started, but I wondered why the Rome effect was so strong (that was a subtle reference to a rise/fall timeline).

So, I decided to study the Google results on fresh articles, and their mentions in search engines. I used the old trick of searching a unique phrase. On August 4th I used a unique phrase from each article on Google’s engine: 0 results. I then submitted both articles to iSnare for distribution. On August 8th I got an email that both articles had been approved and syndicated; a second Google search revealed 0 results for both.

0 results again on Aug. 9th. Then on Aug. 10th I saw the first signs of life: 7 results for Article 1 and 8 results for Article 2. By Aug. 15th, Article 1 had 437 results, and Article 2 had 458 results. There are two points of note here:

Point 1: I submitted both articles under the same category. They were approximately the same length (around 450 words). I submitted them on the same within minutes of each other, and yet Article 1 lagged behind Article 2 for some reason.

Point 2: At this point (Aug. 15th) there were no supplemental results for either article. All 400+ results were fully viewable in the main index.

On the 16th of August the dupe filter must have kicked in on Article 1, because supplementals appeared and total results dropped to 361. Article 2 continued to thrive with 556 results on the 16th, with still no supplementals showing.

Eventually the dupe filter must’ve kicked in on Article 2 as well, and by August 30th, both result counts were below 50 (39 and 34 for 1 & 2, respectively).

As of today, Big G shows 11 results, of a total of 16 for Article 1 (so, approx. 4 supplementals). Article 2 fared better in the end, today displaying 16 results of 22 total (so, approx. 6 supplementals).

The [recently exported] PageRank for the top 10 results on each article range from 0-2, with the majority being 0 (and 2 N/As!).

So now some theories:

1. Article 1’s target phrase was more competitive than Article 2’s. My theory is that the more competitive an area, the greater number of filters (or in some cases, reviews) a page must pass to become part of the index. This is explained best in the theory of long-tail keywords, where phrases that don’t mean much in a marketing sense have a lot of impact on John Q. Searcher.

2. To compete with social bookmarking, Google needs to be buzz-aware. When a site creates a certain amount of buzz (linking, textual-references, etc.) Google needs to get in there and evaluate it for ranking. It will weight these sites with additional trustrank to get on top of the coming wave. A second (and potentially third) filter will later decide if the page is worth keeping in the index. Possibly by analyzing search volume for a phrase vs. the amount of “buzz”.

What might a takeaway be from this experiment? In my case, the combination of the “buzz” created with the article distro, plus the already-established authority (or Trustrank) of the site was enough to put the [brand new] pages I was targeting into the top 10 for their intended keyphrase.

As with most SEO activities, it is recommended to use this tool appropriately, and in combination with other tools.
Any thoughts?

Update: Looks like Aaron Wall and I may have been thinking along some similar lines.  He just posted about  new domains getting ranked in Google over old sites, and mentioned the following:

“Also think of the search business model as though you are a search engine. To them, being the first person to do something is a sign of quality because to be the first person in a market requires some market timing / knowledge / investment / luck.”

“Catch a wave” theory, explained in financial terminology.