Archive for December, 2008
Welcome to Directory Recap
After a year of development (on and off) we are up and running at nearly full speed!
Our goal here is to provide the largest, most up to date, most accurate, collection of link directories on the internet. Everyone knows that you need links to be successful. And we all agree, well most of us realists, that directory links are a part of that link building process. So why not provide a way to help people find the most relevant directories for their website?
We even made our list compatible with DigiXmas, and it’s free!! Well, out lists are at least. If you don’t have DigiXmas yet, you need to get it. It helps streamline the process of submitting your website to relevant directories.
Want to help and earn rewards? We got you covered there too. If you join the review team you can earn credits for every site you review. Those credits can then earn you some great rewards, like dedicated profile pages here at Recap. And that is just the start.
The staff and reviewers here at Directory Recap are excited about where we are heading, and as always, if you have any questions or suggestions, pop over to the forums and let us know.
Getting links from Flickr
Flickr is one of the major photo sharing websites for those of you living under a rock.. In the past people, many people, have suggested that you could get some easy links to your site by simply looking for high PR Flickr pages and then posting links to your website in the comments.. Personally, I can’t stand this type of comment spam, it ruins communities and can cause users to not share their photos.. I’m glad that they put in the nofollow tag to help cut down on this type of comment spam..
That said, there is still a way to get links from Flickr and Flicker users while not descending in to the dirty spammer mentality..
The first step is to find a picture that you can use on your website..
- It can be anything, but something that is truly useful to you..
- Check the copyright info. most will be All rights reserved but many will be available for commercial use through Creative Commons.
- Follow the license and then contact the person that made the photo and let them know that you used it and appreciate the photo or video.
- Wait for them to blog about you or link to your website to show that they are a ‘professional’ because a commercial website thought enough of it to use it.
That’s it.. Simple really.. Will everyone link to you, no.. But that’s not the point.. You got a great photo for free so that has it’s own value.. But the potential for a nice link that isn’t comment spam, or from a generic link directory is worth the effort..
Finally, to make life even easier for you, because we all know how lazy you are when it comes to link building, check out this plugin for Wordpress that lets you search flickr by keyword, look at thumbnails, and even add the photo to your post with the proper attributes..
Link Building with Directories
I’ve been playing with directory links a lot lately.. There are so many of them out there, and they worked so well for so long, that I thought that they needed another look see.. So what did I see??
More of the things we already know.. There are good directories and there are bad directories.. But what stuck out was the difference in link recognition and what happened to the website I used for testing..
The setup:
- 4 new domains in similar niches.
- Nothing but directory submissions
The Process:
- site #1 was simply hammered out using digiXmas
- site #2 used digi but only submitted to directories with a toolbar pr of 2 or better
- site #3 was submitted to pr2 and better directories in digi and then a ’small’ sampling of pr1 and pr0 directories
- site #4 was submitted to only pr4 or better directories
The Results:
Site #1: as expected, 60 days later it’s just sort of sitting there.. It’s doing fine in MSN/Live, but almost nothing in Google or Yahoo.
Site #2: did better than #1 but still sat unnoticed for more than 30 days. It was picked up and indexed, but never moved.
Site #3: actually did the best. It popped out of the nowhere land of sub 500 in Google to top 100 in about 3 weeks.
Site #4: meh. Nothing significant to report. It lands somewhere between #2 and #3 for results. I think that a lot of this has to do with the limited number of links at that level of directory. Even with paid directories the numbers just aren’t there to support a website.
Obviously you will rarely build a site and do nothing but directory submissions for promotion, at least if you want to be even a little successful. But what I’m seeing here is that new websites getting tons of pr0 and pr1 links can actually slow down your acceptance, I hate to use the term trust, with the major search engines. You can get them, but they need to be in moderation with much better links.
Also, tools like digiXmas are great for banging out some quick links to help your site along, but like any tool you need to know when to stop using it.. A quick 1600 links may sound great, but if you hold back a bit and only do the top 600 to 700 you may find that you get better results.
And yes, I know that this is hardly scientific, but I’d bet $100 that’s more testing than 99% of the people claiming to be SEOs are doing.
