10,000 Sites, 1,000 Search Engines, 0 Value

There Aren’t Really 1,000 Search Engines

Many sites or web design companies will offer to submit your site to a vast amount of search engines. The truth of the matter is that very few search engines matter, and those that do will find you whether you submit your site to them or not.

From the Net Marketshare report, as of April 2011, Google has 83.82% percent of the global market, Yahoo has 5.58%, Baidu (a Chinese search engine) has 4.48% and Bing has 3.92%, with all other search engines in the extreme minority.

To make it even worse, almost every search engine other than Google or Bing pulls their results from one of those two. Even Yahoo gets search results from Bing. In other words, Google (and perhaps Bing) are all you need to worry about.

Why Directories Aren’t So Impressive

“We will submit your site to thousands of directories, giving you many valuable links!” Does this hyperbole seem familiar? You may have seen advertisements like this on the web.

On the surface, it sounds great. That’s a lot of places for potential customers to find your site. If you know anything about SEO, you know that having other sites linking to yours is very, very important. If your competitor’s small business website has five links, but yours has five thousand, then that will be a thousand times more effective, right?

Wrong.

Google is smart enough to recognize a link farm when it sees it. Here are some interesting points to consider:

• The more links to a site, the more valuable links from that site are. Most directories are rarely linked to.
• The more links from a page, the less value any of them provides. Directory pages have almost no content except vast amounts of links, meaning any influence the directory has is divided many, many ways.
• Most directories are only of interest to web site owners who want their site listed in a directory. Potential customers aren’t browsing through them to find a place to send their business. The odds are very slim of a paying customer finding you through a directory.
• Google has a low opinion of sites that link to many poor sites linking to yours.  If all the links pointing to your site are from sites that will link to anything, it won’t necessarily benefit your site.

Local Business Directories

Having said that, not all directories are bad. Google Places is essentially a business directory that also adds businesses to Google Maps, and having your small business listed there is essential. The Yahoo and Bing equivalents can also be useful.

Then there are sites like YellowPages.com and others, which are actually intended to be a resource people use to find local businesses. And once in a while, someone does, but not frequently. From an SEO perspective these typically have no value, as they almost always set links to “nofollow,” telling Google not to provide any SEO benefit with the link. (Sometimes sites set their links nofollow to avoid link posting from spammers trying to work on SEO.)

There’s also the possibility of finding some sort of niche directory–a list of cat groomers open on major holidays, or perhaps a business directory for your specific neighborhood. Those might, might be useful.

Should You Pay for a Link Directory?

You might be surprised, after seeing those ads offering to submit your site to thousands of directories for a low price, to hear of directories charging hundreds of dollars–per year–to list your site.

The difference between them and those other directories is simply that they charge for the link. Such directories tend to have fewer links, leading to more professional sites (you have to be pretty serious about your website to want to pay for that directory listing!), and in general be a bit more respectable. It’s also possible they use some of the income to improve their own site’s SEO, so they actually have some value to pass on to the sites in their directory. They can be a cut above the typical free directory–it’s entirely possible one paid directory listing can give you more benefit than thousands of free directory listings. (Note that I say possible. Not all paid directories are valuable.)

Should you pay for a paid directory listing? There can be a wide debate about that, but my opinion is to say no. For one, Google doesn’t like paid links, and you don’t want to end up potentially penalized someday. Secondly, I simply feel that there are more effective ways to use your time and money to benefit your site. The first step is to ask the obvious sources (chamber of commerce, trade association, clients, partners) for links where it would be logical for them to link to you.

After that, the key is to produce valuable content. Then you are contributing something to the Internet. You are doing something to build a relationship with potential clients, to convince them you are an authority on the subject. You are providing content other people may want to link to naturally–not just one link from a directory, but potentially many links from other websites. And of course, you can submit content as articles to ezines and so forth.

In conclusion, don’t be swayed by promises of thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of links or search engines. Focus your attention on providing useful content to impress clients, get crawled by search engines, and linked to from other websites.