List of Directories For Submissions?

[Cherie]

Besides using VileSilencer, was there a list of suggested Directories for submissions of our sites?

Thanks!!

[mdavery]

Placing a free ad on Craig's List (http://craigslist.org or http://sfbay.craigslist.org) was mentioned as a quick way of getting your site listed with the search engines. Also mentioned was posting a helpful comment in a related blog that gets a lot of traffic, and that will allow you to include your website in the comment. There are some sources listed in the "Links from CD's" link on disk one - see the "Search Engines, Part 2" section.

Hope this helps.

[Cherie]

Thanks-I did know of those things. I was just looking for a list of preferred directories. No problem if there isn't one.

[Sydney]

Vilesilencer is by far the best, and by the time you've submitted a site to all those directories, you won't need any more. A Tier B or Tier A site would be best served by some paid directories, but that's plenty for a Tier C.

[mfoster7]

Cherie, just as a point of clarification (in case you haven't used vilesilencer before), they offer a service of collecting information concerning hundreds of SEO-friendly directory sites so that people like us can use the list, connect to each site one at-a-time, and register our own sites with them. That's why Sydney is saying vilesilencer is enough for tier C sites. Once you have registered your site with the hundreds of directory sites in the list that vilesilencer maintains (current downloadable list at http://info.vilesilencer.com/seo-friendly-list.xls), the almost-500 sites in the list should hopefully be plenty. And if you're short on time or don't know if you want to register each of your sites with all 500 of those directory sites, then after downloading the spreadsheet at the URL above, you can sort the list based on the directory site's PR ranking (column C in the spreadsheet) and start with the highest ranked site, then work your way down. (In order to sort the spreadsheet, you will first need to unmerge the cells on that spreadsheet worksheet.)

As a side note, if you scan through the vilesilencer.com home page, you will understand why "vile" is in their name... :-(

Alternatively, to help ease the administrative burden of submitting to directories, Brad Callen (not to be confused with Brad Fallen, whom Sydney refers to a lot) has a free directory submission tool at http://directorysubmitter.imwishlist.com/ that can be used to eliminate some of the time-consuming directory submission activity.

Using that tool, you still must submit to one site at-a-time (as opposed to one mass submission to all directory sites with one click of the mouse), but the information you load into the tool before beginning pre-populates each directory site with that same information when you connect to it via the tool so you don't need to continually copy & paste data. Brad's free directory submission tool contains 350 directory sites. A couple of those sites have a PR ranking of 6, another 17 have a PR ranking of 5, about 80 have a PR ranking of 4, and the rest are PR 3 and below.

Comparing that with vilesilencer's list of almost 500, one site has a PR ranking of 8, three have a PR ranking of 6, 19 have a PR ranking of 5, 74 have a PR ranking of 4, and the rest are 3 and below.

So on shear PR ranking, the numbers are actually similar. I don't know how many of Brad's 350 directory sites are the same as those on vilesilencer's list. And vilesilencer advertises their list as "SEO-friendly" directory sites. Brad doesn't. That doesn't necessarily mean the directory sites in his list aren't "SEO-friendly". I simply haven't seen anything from him indicating his criteria for selecting the 350 in his list.

Of course, Brad has a paid version of his directory submission tool. :-) That costs $67 and is capable of submitting to over 2200 directory sites, with flexibility to add any others not included that you stumble across.

The free version of Brad's tool, though, has the capability for you to add any directories to it that you wish to use. That's a nice feature. So, for example, if you'd like to look through vilesilencer's list, identify any that are PR 5 and up that are not in Brad's directory tool, you can manually enter those yourself into Brad's tool. But it has an annoying quirk that I can't find a way around. Once you've manually added a new directory to the list of the 350 others, if you log off and back in again, those you added are gone. The tool has a user data export/import feature that appears to be intended to allow you to export/save your manually-added directories to your hard drive, and then import the data back in later (perhaps after each successive login?), but I can't get the import part of the sequence to work. (Even though the exported user data file is created as a binary, you can still read some of the basic data in the file using Notepad and thereby see the directory data you created with the tool.)

If, for example, you delete 2 of the 350 already-provide directories from the tool list, add 2 new ones of your own, export those two to a file on your PC, then import the file right back in, the tool appears to pull in two directories from Brad's web site storage rather than loading back in the 2 you exported. ???

The tool doesn't have a lot of features, and some aren't intuitive since no instructions come with it. But you can do an undocumented right mouse click in the directories list pane of the tool and see some available functionality (such as add directory, edit directory, delete directory, etc.).

And with the free tool, you can create a separate information "project" for each of your web sites, then use that project info for whichever of your web sites you wish to advertise on the various directory sites.

So as a free tool, it has its pros & cons. I guess you get what you pay for. But on the whole, it beats copy & paste.

At this point, I definitely do not have enough experience to say whether using vilesilencer's directories or Brad's free (or even paid) directories are more effective for our tier C sites' exposure. But the mere time savings using the directory tool certainly make it worth testing.

By the way, Brad also offers a free article submitter tool to help with the labor of submitting articles to sites like ezinearticles, etc. However, the free version does not include the two main sites Sydney recommends to us (ezinearticles.com and goarticles.com), and unlike Brad's directory submission tool that allows you to manually add some of your own known directories into the tool, the article submission tool does not have that same manual add capability. Nor does the paid version. I don't know if that was a development oversight, future feature, or intended limitation, but I did confirm the feature lack with his support staff. However, since with our tier C endeavor, Sydney is only recommending we submit articles via ezinearticles, goarticles, and iSnare, that's not such a big deal to copy & paste information there or to use RoboForm.

But it is a bigger deal with submitting to hundreds of directory sites. Thus the freebie directory submission tool may be worth the quirks...

[Cherie]

Mfoster7 (wish I knew your real name!)-

Wow!!!! Great response! Thank you so much. I have not used Vilesilencer before and you definitely helped me A LOT!!

Thanks again! Going there right now.

:D