One popular form of advertising is through directory submission. A lot of people use it to boost traffic to their website, which will help them sell more products and get an increase in their profit. However, submitting to directories is not only time consuming, but many directories will even charge a fee for your submission. Let’s take a look and see if it’s worth using.

What Are Directories?

A directory is an area in which you’re able to submit a link to your website. This can be done in several ways. One method is to submit an article to a website that advertises within itself with links. The other method is to submit direct links to a linking directory that just act as a backlink, as well as a way for searchers to find websites that they’re looking for.

Change In Search Engine Optimization

At one point, article directories were the best way to build backlinks because they provided information to the viewer, while giving you a link that referred back to your website. This put plenty of popularity on the page the link was hosted on making it a better reference.

However, Google has aimed to stop article directories because it is a way of cheating the system. Website designers were able to build hundreds, possibly thousands, of backlinks by just shooting out articles full of fluff to directories just to build links. This started a massive search engine project known as Google Panda.

Google Panda

The release of Google Panda hit a lot of websites hard because it greatly lowered their amount of usable backlinks, which often knocked them right off the front page of results. Google Panda was released in 2011, which is when directories were no longer a valid way of increasing your ranking.

The main focus for Google Panda was to attack directories that were mass producing pointless articles. These articles would be stuffed with keywords and would often not make any sense at all. Quality directories that produced articles that were worth reading didn’t get hit nearly as hard, although they still provided less of an impact on a website’s ranking than they did before Google Panda.

Conclusion

Directories are not a very good way to build up your ranking with search engine optimization. They are a waste of time and resources compared to many other methods that could be used in their place that would provide much better results.