Does Auto Submission Damage Your Rankings?

Are you looking for a fast and easy way to achieve top rankings for your website? Many people are in search of the quickest means to ranking well on search engines. Not too long ago I was working with a client on applying some SEO techniques. I started with a focus on on-page optimization and then migrated towards off page optimization in an effort to generated inbound links to their website.

Building your web site's popularity is essential for improving your search engine rankings. Major search engines like Google apply an algorithm to define the value of your web site or web page. This in turn drives your search engine ranking for specific keywords. One way to think about the process of web site ranking is like a voting machine. The more votes you get the better your site ranks.

The very first thing to do is to evaluate a web site for the criteria that would make it easy to spider. Search engines spider need to access quality content to better classify each page on the web. After applying navigation that allows users to easily find content and search engine spiders to categorize content properly, its time to identify effective link building strategies.

One particular link strategy is related to directory submissions. Essentially you find directories that are well established and relevant to the subject matter of your own web site. The site I was working with had about 300 directories that would be ideal for a site like has. As a result, and due to the urgency by which he wanted the work done, we chose an automated directory submission service.

Within 48 hours of the site being submitted, the web sites ranking for targeted keyword terms dropped by more than 62 percent. I couldn't believe what a detrimental affect the automated submission service had on this particular web site. Could this be coincidence or is there proof of the damaging effects of automated submission?

The team was not working on any other form of link building and as a result, what happened seems to be directly related to the automatic submission service. The challenge with these types of services is that you really can't tell what type of activity they are engaged in when submitting to directories. All that I know for sure is that our rankings dropped significantly after the submission date.

My recommendation to anyone building links to their web site of blog is to simply stay away from automated services that promise results. Google and other search engines appear to be catching on and know what you've used an automated service to do your link building. You can still submit to directories to build quality one-way links to your web site. However, I recommend that you do so manually.

By Michael Fleischner

About the author:
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