Firstly, what is directory submission? Web directories are online catalogues of companies with a web presence. A description of the services, products or company website can be submitted to a directory. If the submission is accepted by the directory editor, the description will be listed on one of the directory pages together with a link back to the company website. Any directory that has been running for more than a few months will soon contain many thousands of company listings. To make sense of these listings, the listings will be split into categories, e.g. business listings or software listings, so that a visitor to the directory can more easily find the company information he is looking for, then by clicking on the company website link shown in the directory, the user can visit the appropriate website. In this way, the directory benefits people searching for specific products and services as well as company owners as they get increased traffic from the web directories.
In the early days of the internet, directories were a key way of finding information, early directories like BOTW contained listings that had been reviewed and cleanly categorised by the editors. When search engines were far more primitive than the highly sophisticated Google and Bing or Yahoo engines that exist today, many people would visit web directories like BOTW in order to find information. However, as the number of pages on the internet grew and grew through the 1990s, the amount of information and number of websites became impossible to categorise manually and new companies like Google became very powerful by using algorithms like google pagerank to prioritise results when users look for information on their search engine portals.
At this point in the evolution of the internet, with people using increasingly powerful search engines to find information, you could believe that web directories would die away as they were no longer as useful to their visitors for finding information. However, webmasters soon realised that a listing in a web directory would actually help the performance of a website in the new search engines. The increased performance in search engine results was due to the link that the web directory gave back to the listed company website. Search engine algorithms like google pagerank count the number of backlinks a website has, with more links giving better performance for the site in search engine results. So although the original purpose of web directories was weakened, the more directory listings a company website had, the more visitors the website would get through search engine results.
Over the years, the search engine companies have taken steps to weaken the effect a link from a web directory has on a websites performance in SERPs. However there is still some benefit to be gained from being listed in web directories and the technique of directory submission still plays an essential part in any search engine optimization campaign. There if often discussion on webmaster forums about the best method for directory submission - manual or automatic - but the truth is that if done properly there is no difference between the methods, except that automatic directory submission will save loads of time spent visiting each web directory independently and filling in your website details for submission.
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