Using directories as a honeypot

May 2, 2011 by

Once web directories were widely used as means of navigation on the web, nowadays they are almost exclusively used as means of increasing the number of backlins to someone’s site. Nevertheless you can also install a new directory only to create a kind of honeypot in order to figure out the different tactics advanced link marketeers, black hat SEO professionals commonly reffered as spammers use on a daily basis.

Who will discover your empty directory?

If you publish a link directory or a social bookmarking site on a parked domain of yours or simply at a subdomain belonging to a free hosting service, sooner or later some SEO professionals will discover it by using some kind of search engine scraping, provided that you let Google see your newly created link collection.

Checking your statistics you will be able to see some search queries and discover what kind of directory footprints have your submitters searched for in order to find your site.

Later on some of them will list your directory in their directory lists or even include it in a link submission tool. The first benefit of establishing a honey pot directory will be that it willa allow you to discover some popular directories of directories or submission tools.

What will they do?

On the other hand you can analyze the sites which have been submitted to your directory by trying to find answers to questions like:

  • What kind of anchor texts and descriptions are they using?
  • What other sites have they submitted the same link to?
  • Did the above activities result in any change in Google’s rankings?

All in all investing some time in analyzing your submitters will help you to learn more about effective and “contemporary” link building techniques based on web directory, article directory and social bookmarking site submissions.

These experiences can be quite handy if you are planning to enter a market  or niche where you have not much previous exerience such as foreign language markets: installing the corresponding translation, linking from just a few sites and waiting for the first submitters to come.

Beware of spam

The reason why I suggested that you install your link collecting site on a separate, otherwise not used domain is that this way you can try different kind of directory scripts and CMS-es, thus getting rather different traffic streams and link submitters.

For instance your Pligg-based site will be filled up with spam quickly, unless you take some countermeasures to stop heavy spamming. While a Pligg site will provide you interesting information about the nature of social bookmark spamming, other, basically spamproof scripts such as Arfooo will rather give you examples of a bit more valuable link submissions.

How link submitters work?

All in all if you create a directory site with whatever content, and let it be visible by search engines, then you will be able to get hands-on experiences with some advanced techniques. In theory you could also do this with any legitimate site of yours too, but normally you would never encorurage anyone to submit any kind of links as fighting spam is more important there than experimentations.

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Is Automatic Directory Submission Evil?

Jun 20, 2010 by

Submit your site manually! — you can frequently see this advice on different SEO forums, perhaps because many link builders think automated submissions are equal to spamming. While it is true that automatic directory submitters can be used to spam others’ web directories or social bookmarking sites, they can be used for legitimate purposes too, just like nuclear energy can be used for other purposes than building an H-bomb.

Feature overview of automatic submitters

While you submit to various directories manually, there are quite a few tasks to accomplish:

  • gathering a list of directories where you plan to submit,
  • reading the submission guidelines to see whether your site would fit,
  • physically filling out the form fields,
  • varying the content of textual fields like title and description,
  • finding the best category for your site,
  • solving various CAPTCHAs,
  • administering where, how and when have you submitted your site.

The majority of these tasks means tedious work for you without much thinking, and this is where automated submission software can give a hand to you.

Providing directory lists

It is true that some directory submitters compile their directory lists based on technological criteria rather than quality criteria — simply because they can handle only directories powered by a certain directory script —, but there are others which can handle almost any type of directories or even let you add your own directory collection.

That’s why some automated submitters can offer lower quality directory lists, while other can give you access to directories you would not have discovered on your own.

Adhering to submission guidelines

First of all let’s differentiate the two basic types of automatic submissions:

  • semi-automatic submission means that the software loads the submission form just as you have opened it with your browsers, while
  • automatic submission lets you choose category and solve CAPTCHAs without actually displaying the submisison page.

Therefore in case of semi-automatic submission, you can easily read the submission rules, so just as with manual submission, you can avoid spamming directories.

On the other hand, directory software which provide automatic submission methods usually only include those directories which have no special rules or criteria for submissions, directories which collect every kind of web sites, not only those which fit in a narrow niche or regional topic.

Filling form fields

This step is where automated directory submission can show its strength: while some browsers can help you to auto-fill string fields having clicked in the field, text areas have to be filled in with at least copy-pasting your text. It is obvious that your submission won’t be better if the name and e-mail fields are filled in by hand.

Directory submitters not only fill all the necessary fields immediately but also offer features to generate mostly unique titles and descriptions by combining or randomly rotating predefinded texts — something you would rarely do manually.

Choosing the right category

Sometimes when you have to browse through a long list of categories using a dropdown menu, it is hard to find the right category and also takes a lot of time. Directory submitters can suggest the appropriate category or highlight multiple categories in the list based on your predefined keywords, or simply choose a category you have alredy used by previous submissions.

Solving CAPTCHAs

The fact that directory submitters can provide you with automated services for solving captchas doesn’t mean that these tools are built to spam. Captchas pose an unnecessary problem for us too who have never spammed (at least intentionally) any directory.

Keeping track of the submission process

Directory submitters offer various tools to administer the submission process: where and when have you submitted your site, what texts have you used and what has been the result of the submission, etc.

If you do this manually, sometimes you can erroneusly submit to a directory twice or simply omit a directory which is on your list, but obviously if you automate it, it will not do any harm.

Automatic vs. manual submission

Having read through the above feature list, you might have seen why  and how directory submitters speed up the entire submission process while providing useful features to further enhance the quality of your submissions.

Automatic or semi-automatic directory submitters are just tools which let you quickly spam hundreds of directories or generate worthless external links, but they can also help you to promote your site by getting valuable links quickly and with less efforts than doing it manually. The result depends solely on how conscientiously these tools have been used: a single link created by an automated directory submitter does not have a different smell — it looks just like the submission you would have sent manually.

Does Google recognize automated submissions?

For many webmasters the biggest concern about automatic submissions is that Google will recognize those links which have been created by automatic directory submitters. Fortunately this is not the case, because Google in fact can only recognize unnatural network of external links. Unnatural means for instance that you create

  • hundreds of links with the same anchor text and/or with the same textual context or
  • there are too many links pointing to your site from the same web site or web neigbourhood or
  • your site acquires external links just too quickly, unnaturally quickly.

As you can see these type of links can be created either by manual or automatic submissions, therefore the main factor is that how these techniques are used: both manual submission and automatic submitters can result in absolutely worthless links.

Just keep in mind that you should not submit to each and every directory your submitter software offers, you should not submit with one title/description, and you should not submit to hundreds of directories today, and Google will never figure out how these links have been generated.

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Why would anyone write about directories of directories?

Nov 12, 2009 by

Basically the lists of directories are nowadays useful for two purposes: they help you to promote your directory and these lists are also useful if you are plannig to promote your web site by submitting it to various directories.

For Directory Owners

If your directory is submitted to these directories of directories not only some link juice will be passed to your link collection, but the attention of various web site promoters and link builders will be drawn, thus helping your directory to evolve, getting more submitters.

For Link Builders

Extensive, up-to-date and well managed directories of directories can ease the tedious tasks of finding the right directories to submit your site to, especially if you have a certain concept (e.g. looking for niche, regional, or free direcories) rather than posting your site everywhere. These lists might come very handy if you happen to build links in a new language or a new niche topic you never did before.

For Search

List of directories and search engines were considered a useful tool at the dawn of the web, when directories were in many cases equal to search engines, and just a few search engine or directory was able to cover more than a specific region or country. Nowadays — I guess — nobody uses the directories of directories for searching.

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