OVBlogger: Blogging and SEO

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SEO and Affiliate Marketing genius, Jerry West, who’s also a faculty member at Stomper Net, says that the directories have lost beaucoup PR points at Google.

You can see the results of his hand-done survey here:

SEO Revolution

So, apparently many directories lost ground in the recent PR update, and many are below PR4. Some lost their PR entirely.

Only Family Friendly Sites walked away with a PR6 and Seoma and Clickey came away with PR5s.

PR4 sites are still good to link to, if you have low PR, but are directories still worth the time and effort? Hmm… I guess you’ll have to decide. For me, I can think of much more productive ways to spend my time.

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I just finished writing a post over at the Conquer Your Niche forum about directories and thought I’d share:

Actually,

Google specifically isn’t really counting links from many directories. DMOZ.org, Yahoo, or Joe Ant are quality listings in their eyes. A plain old “link farm” directory won’t get you anywhere.

What they’re concerned about is that the directory makes sense. If you’re listed in a golf directory for an Internet marketing information product, it won’t help a bit.

Also, if the links aren’t reviewed and validated by humans, you won’t get any link juice, either, because that’s one of Google’s requirements for a “quality” directory.

I wouldn’t waste too much time on directories.

My advice is to apply for a listing in DMOZ at http://dmoz.org, which is free. Yahoo’s directory is $299 a year, so unless you’re making the income to justify that, it’s probably not going to work for you. But…

Joe Ant.com, (http://joeant.com) for example, is like $40 one time and it will get you the kind of backlink you want. Not a bad investment, IMO.

Articles work much better. Plus, you can turn around and re-purpose them for your blog. Of course, you don’t want to use the same article in your blog that you post to Ezine Articles or Go Articles or another quality directory. You need to rewrite the whole thing so that it’s at least 60% different so that you don’t run into the “duplicate content” issue. You won’t be penalized, but you won’t benefit, either. Google may decide that some other site gets credit for your work, as they tend to pick only one site to credit for a particular piece of content.

Directories aren’t even as powerful as blogging. Writing in a blog everyday will get you far more traction with the search engines, however Google does love itself. A DMOZ listing is just as good as ever.

Does anyone ever get DMOZ listings? I’m not sure. I placed links about two years ago that still haven’t shown up. But then, I didn’t become an editor, either. I hear that’s a quicker road to success there.

Bottom line? I wouldn’t waste too much time with directories. Concentrate on other stuff that works much, much better–articles, press releases, social bookmarking, and so on.

And of course… my favorite… blogging! It totally rocks.

Come to my telseminar series on blogging with some of the biggest names in the IM world… Call tonight!

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