SliQ Submitter has always been a pretty good directory submitter. For a year or so it was free to use, then it switched to asking for payment. In the last few days though, sliqsubmitter.com has made two versions available. The existing SliQ Submitter 2009 has been updated and renamed SliQ Submitter Lite and a new SliQ Submitter Plus version has been launched. SliQ Submitter Plus includes a fast submission interface that works a lot like DigiXmas:

fast directory submitter interface

You can try the tool out for free and make 100 submissions. Having given the trial a go I managed to submit to 100 directories in less than 10 minutes. When you start SliQ Submitter Plus, a wizard prompts you to enter your website details - URL, description, title etc. Then you press the Fast button and the directory submission interface launches. All you need to do then is pick a directory category and press the Submit button (or press the F9 shortcut key). SliQ Submitter learns the categories you pick and will automatically select a category in a directory if it matches one you’ve used before. After 5 or so submissions, it pretty much always finds a match.

Semi automatic directory submitter

Here’s a list of the features I liked:-

1. SliQ learns the directory categories you select and always picks the deepest it can find when you next submit.
2. As you submit, the tool records the submission status (success/ failure/ skipped) in its directory list.
3. You can edit descriptions and titles as you submit and SliQ will record your additions/ changes.
4. If the directory submissions succeeds, the anchor text submitted is recorded.
5. If a directory submission fails it tries to capture the failure reason. 
6. When a directory submission fails, SliQ Captures a screenshot of the submission page which you can view by right-clicking on the directory.
7. SliQ sorts the directories into fastest submission order - High to Low PR with no captcha, followed by High to Low PR with captcha.

There is still work to be done on the new SliQ Submitter. It would be good to export submission stats to a PDF as well as Excel for example, and it would be useful to be able to decode captchas automatically to further speed up submission but all in all its a good, fast submitter.

Download SliQ Submitter Plus from the original site: http://www.sliqsubmitter.com.

If you’re going to trade links with another site there are a few things to look out for. Personally, I never feel comfortable about doing a link exchange unless I’m getting a fair deal at the time of the exchange. I also like to feel confident the value of the link I get won’t drop off over time. For these reasons I always do some research on a potential link partner before doing a trade. Here are the main things I look for:-

Check the backlinks make the PageRank believable

Does the PageRank of the site match the number of backlinks the site has? Examine the site’s backlinks using Yahoo SiteExplorer. Got to www.yahoo.com and type in link: followed by the domain you want to check, e.g.

link:www.dowebseo.com

If the site has a PR of 4 and only 2 links, the odds are the PageRank shown on the Google toolbar is out of date and the real PR of the site is a lot less.

What share of the available link juice will you get?

How many other outgoing links are there on the webpage you’ll get a link from? Are there loads of links in the sidebar/ blogroll and footer? I never trade with a site that has more than 10 outgoing links on its homepage and unless the site has PR > 5, I like to see less than 5 links. If the page is PR 3 and there are 50 outgoing links, you aren’t going to get a lot of link juice passed your way.

Does the site have unique content that will turn up in searches?

Check if the site contains content duplicated on other sites. Take a few phrases from the site and do a search for them on Google. Place the phrases in double quotes when doing a search, e.g.

"this is the phrase to search for"

If the phrase turns up on a number of sites, the content is copied and the site is not a good candidate for a link exchange.

Does the website look a bit shady?

Does the name of the domain match the theme of the content? For example if the domain name is pet-food related but the site contains reviews of gadgets like mobile phone’s stay away. It’s likely the site is a dropped domain and the value of any backlinks it has are likely to be discounted by Google.

Does the site look like it sells links?

Does the site contain other outgoing links to unrelated sites on different themes? If it does then the site may be selling links rather than gathering quality link exchanges. The value of any link from the site might be devalued by Google.

There are other things you can look out for but I’ll go into these in a later blogpost. Following the 5 tips above is a quick way to spot the majority of bad link partners.

Finding .gov or .edu blogs is really easy. All you need do is use the site: operator in the Google search box.

For example, to find blogs on .gov sites:

site:.gov inurl:blog

or blogs on .edu sites:

site:.edu inurl:blog

Of course visiting blogs found using the above method doesn’t mean the blog is necessarily dofollow. to make spotting dofollow blogs easier, I’d recommend using the FireFox browser and installing the NoDoFollow plugin. This plugin highlights nofollow/ dofollow links on a web page and will help you pin down possible linking opportunities.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5687

Happy blog hunting!

Often the recommended route for making submissions is to do it manually. Make a post on a webmaster forums asking for advice on directory submission and you’ll probably get a ton of responses saying that the manual way is the best. Trouble is, no-one every says what they really mean by doing it manually. Really, what people advise when the recommend submitting manually to directories is:-

Make sure you submit your site details to the most appropriate category in the directory

If you don’t submit your site to the most appropriate category, two things are likely to happen:-

1. The directory owner will be more likely to reject the submission as spam.
2. Since your website details are out of context the worth of your backlink will diminish.

The problem with using fully automatic directory submitter tools to do submissions is that your relying on the tool choosing the categories for you. You’ll save a load of time and make hundreds of submissions but you’ll never really be confident that the submissions end up in the best categories.

There’s a similar issue with paying someone else to do manual submissions for you. How do you know they’ll pick the best categories? A lot of times you’ll find people offering to do 1000 manual submissions for $10 or so. These prices are so low they make me suspicious - that’s 1 cent per directory! People must value their time very low to be able to run such a service. Are they really just running a fully automatic submission program?

The best method for Directory Submission

If you want to be sure that the directory submissions are done correctly, the best way is to do them yourself. You can still use a software package to help though - a semi-automatic directory submission software package.

Semi-automatic packages load up directories and prefill the submission form with your website details BUT unlike fully automatic packages they let you verify the selected directory category before making the submission. You save time but can still ensure quality submissions.

One of the best semi-automatic directory submitter packages I’ve come across is SliQ Submitter. This neat, easy to use package lets you submit to over a 1000 directories. The package costs $10 for 3 months use. If you want to use the package for longer you just pay another $10. For your $10 you get to submit details for as many websites as you like and you get updated directories download automatically from the SliQ Submitter website.

For more information on directory submission, see Directory Submission SEO Tips.

1. Keep adding good, keyword-rich textual content.
2. Keep adding backlinks with good anchor text.
3. Wait!

People also ask if there’s a secret to escaping from the sandbox. The advice here is to get high PR links, i.e. links Google trusts. This is meant to help a new domain escape from the sandbox and begin ranking well in a shorter period. Of course, no-one outside Google really knows if the sandbox exists for new domains but my experience is that there is very probably some age-related factor affecting the performance of domains.

The very first website I tried to optimise struggled for the first few months it went live, moving from page 9 or 10 of the results to about page 4 or 5 after 5 months or so. A strange thing began to happen around month 6 though. At certain times of the day, my website would appear in the top 4 results for a pretty good keyword. It would then drop back for the rest of the day. This continued for about a month until eventually I hit the jackpot and stabilised in the #4 spot. I then hovered around this position - say between #4 and #5 until the site was approximately one year old when it stabilised at #2. Ever since the site has rotated between #1 and #2.

Here’s the Google analytics for the site over the first year and a bit after the site went live. Organic traffic only started to really increase after the first 6 months even though I’d done a ton of link-building from the second week. The traffic in the first 6 months is also inflated in the graph below since about 50 to 75% came from Google Adwords

Of course, this graph doesn’t prove anything about how domain age affects performance in SERPs but I’ve since repeated the experience with other websites - for the first few months of the website’s life, SERPs performance and traffic can be hard to come by.

1. The blog comment will be on a page with a decent PageRank.
2. The link to your website will have use your keywords as the link anchor text.
3. The blog is dofollow, i.e. the link won’t have a rel=”nofollow” attribute.

This link-building tip can help you with all three of these factors. The tip involves finding blogs that have the KeywordLuv Wordpress plugin installed. The owners of these blogs want people to comment and in return they give back a dofollow link with keywords of your choice. It’s a fantastic plugin for both bloggers and blog commenters.

To find blogs with the KeywordLuv plugin installed, search for the following on Google:

“YourName@YourKeywords in the Name field”

Keep the quotes around the search term and DON’T replace YourName or YourKeywords - type the search phrase exactly as it appear above. All blogs that have Keyword Luv installed, have this text as an instruction to commenters on how to get their keywords as anchor text. This tip helps with point 3 above and, if we assume that on average higher PR blogs will appear higher in the SERPS, it might be of some help with point 1 above too.

Helping out with point 2 is simple too - add your keywords to the search phrase. So if your keywords are SEO tips, search for this:

seo tips “YourName@YourKeywords in the Name field”

Google will then return results containing all of the phrases. Spend a few minutes seaching and you’ll find loads of blogs to comment on. Remember to make a good, relevant comment that adds to the blog post/ discussion. Owner’s of blogs with KeywordLuv are good enough to provide high-quality links to their commenters so don’t abus the blogs by spamming or the owner will go no follow wiping out most of the worth of any links.

For more link-building tips, read: Using Press Releases to build links and Link-building using DoFollow Blogs

SEO isn’t as simple as submitting your site to thousands of directories though. The vast majority of directories will only give you a weak backlink and in a lot of cases, the web page your link appears on may be completely ignored by search engines like Google.

Over the past 3 or 4 years, Google has realised that people were building huge numbers of links through directory submission and has devalued the worth of directory links. It’s quite common to find directories that have a decent homepage PageRank of 3 or more but all their inner pages have a PR of N/A. A PageRank of N/A means that the links on the inner pages are pretty much worthless. This doesn’t mean though that all directory links are bad. If you have your site in Google Webmasters and Google shows the link from the directory in the External Links section, it means you get some benefit from the link even if it’s small. I know that for some of my sites in Google Webmasters shows a few hundred directory backlinks.

Here are 4 directory submission tips:

What sort of directories should you submit to?

Well, the usual advice is to submit to directories with high PR. However, for the reasons given above, just because a directory has a homepage PR of 4 or 5 doesn’t mean that the inner pages have any link juice to pass on.

Unless the directory is old and well-established, e.g. DMOZ or BOTW, you can’t be sure the homepage PR will stick for very long anyway. In some cases directories are put on dropped or recycled domains and usually, at the next PR update, the PR drops off.

Also, just because a directory is new, or has low PR today, doesn’t mean its PR won’t increase in the future. When people set up a new directory they often start out allowing free submissions or submission that don’t require a reciprocal link. So if a new directory appears make a submission before the directory goes paid or starts needing a reciprocal link before you get listed.

So my recommendation is that since directory submission is so easy, especially if you use a semi-automatic directory submitter, submit to as many as you can - new or old, high PR or low PR.

Do you get a benefit from being listed in major directories like BOTW?

I have to say, in my experience the answer is no. I never saw any benefit from being listed in BOTW - either in ranking in SERPs or in traffic. I also never saw any decrease in rank or traffic from cancelling my listing in BOTW. I did save a few dollars though by cancelling my subscription.

Should you pay for submission?

Maybe, but not much. If you do pay for submission, make sure the page your site gets linked from will have a decent PR. You might pay for submission if you think the directory will give you lots of traffic even if the PR is N/A but you’ll never be able to tell how much traffic you’re going to get before you pay. In the past couple of years, I’ve received no more than a handful of referrals from directories. Remember also, that even if the page your link is on has a PR today, Google might come along and drop it to N/A in the next few months.

Should you give a directory a reciprocal link?

No. Reciprocal links are a bit devalued anyway. The whole idea of directory submission (and SEO) is to get a one way link to your website. Giving a link in return defeats the purpose of doing directory submission.

For more info on directory submission and link-building, read:

• Directory Submitter Software Tools: Can they harm your site?
• Using Press Releases to Build Links
• Link-building using DoFollow Blogs

Pinging the major search engines and blog directories notifies them that you’ve made a new post so they should come and index it double-quick. On this blog, a new post normally appears in the Google search results within 5 minutes of being published.

The bigger benefit of pinging though is that there are a loads of automatic blogs that pick up new posts and link to them. It’s usual that within a few hours each new post on this blog picks up 3 or 4 links from other blogs as a result of pinging. These links aren’t of the highest quality but never turn down the opportunity for an easy link.

To enable pinging, you need to tell Wordpress which pinging services to use when a new blog post is published. To do this:-

1. Log into your blog as the admin.
2. Click on the Settings link over on the right, near the top of the page.
3. Click on the Writing link on the left.
4. Paste the links to pinging sites in the Update Services field at the bottom of the page.
5. Press the Save Changes button.

There are hundreds of pinging services you can use, but there are only a few major ones worth bothering with. Here’s the list I use.

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2/
http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://www.bloglines.com/ping

If you want to easily find out when someone links to your posts, enable trackbacks when you write a post. When another Wordpress blog links to you, you’ll then get a comment on the post being linked to in the form of a trackback. Askimet will pick these trackbacks up as spam so you can easily delete them before they get displayed as comments, but it’s a quick and easy way of knowing who’s linking to you.

For more Wordpress SEO Tips read Improving Wordpress blogpost titles and How to use the All-In-One SEO Pack.

1. Cause the directory owners to ban you.
2. Cause Google to ban you.
3. Just plain kill your site.

I’ve never subscribed to these points of view for the simple fact that it would be too easy to kill a competitor site by submitting their site to a ton of directories using a directory submission tool. It just wouldn’t make sense.

As for a directory owner banning you because you used a piece of software to make the submission -  well  there’s simply no way for a directory to know that a tool is actually making the submission as opposed to a human typing into the fields on the submission page - in both cases the submission page will be loaded into a web browser and the fields completed in a client browser before the form is posted back to the server for handling.

Of course, using a directory submitter tool does have downsides. These downsides won’t harm your site but they might lessen the benefits of having your site listed in loads of directories. The downside of any submitter tool is the speed of submission and the temptation to submit to hundreds of directories with the same title and description every time. The best strategy for directory submission is to maximise the number of variations of title/ anchor text and description so that you get a good range of links with different anchor text. Try to use one variation per 25 to 50 directory submissions.

So what tools are available? Well there are a number of free tools. One of the best is SliQ Submitter.

SliQ Submitter Screenshot

SliQ Submitter lists over a thousand directories and also lets you store multiple variations of titles and descriptions. It tracks which directories you’ve submitted sites to and even lets you export a list of submitted sites to Excel. Personally, I like to use this tool to make 10 to 50 submissions a day over a number of weeks. This lets me keep complete control over the submission process and let me build a nice set of links over a 3 or 4 month period.

Download SliQ Submitter from here.

1. Go to http://www.semiologic.com/software/dofollow/ and download the sem-dofollow.zip plugin.
2. Unzip the plugin to a folder on your hard drive.
3. Upload the unzipped plugin folder to the wp-content/plugins folder for your Wordpress blog.
4. Log in to the admin section of your blog and activate the Do Follow plugin

Your blog is now dofollow!

Take advantage of your new dofollow status and add your blog to one of the many dofollow directories. Hopefully you’ll soon start getting decent comments. Your life will be made a lot easier though if you also activte the Akismet anti-spam plugin for Wordpress too.