Directory Evolution
November 13th, 2008 by Tom BartlingWe have talked with three companies over the last few weeks who are all focused on creating or leveraging their directories. Although directories are nothing new, these companies are focused on capturing and aggressively maintaining position for the terms in the industries that they serve.
Specifically, they are generating content, using solid, white hat SEO practices. This gives them the ability to essentially sell (or rent, as John Rasco says) their high ranking position to companies who either need the position quickly or could not afford the time and expense for real SEO.
I see this tactic as being somewhere between PPC and SEO. The rankings are in the natural search results, but you have to buy this position from these intermediary companies… and you lose this listing as soon as you stop paying. Sounds like PPC to me.
Another big disadvantage for clients of these services is that these results are for the directory sites. Client sites are not building authority. Companies offering this service seem to have their own angle on this approach. I can certainly see the advantages of this for some companies, but it is certainly not a good long term organic SEO strategy.
I think these types of sites will become more and more prevalent, unless Google starts filtering them out.
November 15th, 2008 at 3:40 pm
We track our visitors (even by company name), but none of the directories we submitted to have send hardly any visitors, except the “Web 2.0″ type of directories and one “Geek/nerd” directory.
December 1st, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Good article. As one of the vendors with whom you spoke with I would agree that one of the challenges is the fact that the link building gap you reference is an issue. However we would disagree that it is not a good long term organic SEO strategy.
It would be easy to state that SEO is a function of building inbound links to a client owned website. However with the rise of social media websites and other information aggregators, the role of SEO is becoming more complex.
While inbound link strategies are very important, personalized search and other emerging technologies are focusing on not only helping a viewer find information, but to tailor that information based on their own review. This change is different than traditional SEO as it is not a many to one scenerio (many links to one resource) but a many to many scenerio; recognizing that a client’s marketing message can appear in a number of places that are disconnected from the source and yet will appear in search engines.
For example LinkedIN has profile pages within the Google search index. For a client, the content within LinkedIn can be very important even though there is little to no value in the link back to the client’s website.
At the heart of any SEO strategy is great and compelling content. In this vain we beieve that those that write well will have a natural edge.
Our hope is that we can provide the platform for SEO consultants to write and publish about their clients and use the platform to compliment their SEO activity.
Again, thank you for the posting and for your feedback.
December 1st, 2008 at 6:20 pm
Hi Sean,
Thanks for commenting. You make some great points. I agree that getting great content out to a bunch of good sites is important, if not crucial, to a successful link building strategy.
Each of the companies that we talked with have a specific purpose, and I think that all of them have the potential to fill an important need for their target audience.
For example, your service (www.LeadMaverick.com) seems to be really good at getting great ranking quickly. Although this ranking is for a page on your site, that page would be linked to the client’s unranked site.
Your service is a paid service, though. If I stop paying, the great link I get from you and all the great content I’ve developed for that page go away immediately. This is why I say that it’s a short term strategy. That’s not a problem with the social media sites where the revenue comes from ads rather than paid placement.
One thing you mentioned is that SEO consultants can use your platform to compliment their SEO activity. We have not had a chance to use your service yet, but I do think that it would be a good compliment to the overall strategy… especially for generating leads quickly.
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:20 am
Tom, thank you for the kind words and insight. You make a great point about the paid service. Certainly we have the option of removing your content if the account expires. Usually we keep the content on the site and place an ad in the content as well as add a rel=nofollow to the links. But again this is at our discretion.
Your point is correct and readers of this posting should be aware that all of the work with a directory “could” disappear if you don’t pay - something that everyone should keep in mind when looking at directory services.
There are always trade-offs in any solution - which is why SEO consultants (like RefreshWeb :))should be hired to help clients understand the tradeoffs. No system (even ours) is perfect and the role it plays in an SEM campaign should be balanced by the needs of the client over the long term.
SEO is a discipline with many moving parts and there are benefits and pitfalls in every strategy. Tom’s point is correct - which is why they screen solutions first, to the benefit of their clients.
Again great posting and thank you for letting us share our POV.