You all know aobut directory submission services. There are literally thousands of sites out there offering to “Submit your site to hundreds of directories in a few minutes.” Experienced SEO practitioners know how to treat such claims. There are basically three problems to this.

If it was so simple…

…everyone would be doing it. And if that happens, where are you vis a vis the competition? You might argue that if everyone is doing it, then you have to do it too otherwise you would get buried (The Prisoner’s Dilemma). This brings us to the next point.

Search engines are no fools

Search engines are way past the point where they can identify directories that are used solely for the purpose of link building. Directory submisssion services are easily caught out these days. You might actually incur a penalty for being associated with these sites.

There simply aren’t so many directories!

In the early days of the web, sure there were hundreds of directories all claiming with varying degrees of truth that they were the most popular. But with the directories consolidated now, my estimate is that there are not more than 5 good general purpose directories out there.

However, there are certainly some good directories that you must submit to from where you can get traffic and link juice. Dmoz is one great place. If your page is a blog, there are some pretty good blog directories which it pays to be on. In a later article we will take a look at some of these sites. The best ones don’t let you just put in whatever you want, but have an approval process. And that is definitely a good sign.

Be wary of things that seem to easy. If it’s too good to be true, it usually is!

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