Is Automatic Directory Submission Evil?

Jun 20, 2010 by dodod

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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