Does Auto Submission Damage Your Rankings?

Wondering how you might be able to get ranked on top for a specific keyword? Thinking there may be a short cut or two? Recently I had the opportunity to work with a client who was also in search of ways to automate much of the search engine optimization process. I started the assignment working with him to improve his website design and architecture. Soon there after, we focused on building links to his site.

The concept of off page optimization is really all about building up your site’s credibility. As more sites point to your website, Google analyzes the quality of those links and in turn, passes that link value to you. The more quality web sites that refer to your site, the more popular your web site becomes. All of this can be summed up as Google PR or Google Page Rank.

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.

A great way to build one way links is with directory submissions. The process is simple. All you need to do is to find directories related to your web site niche. There are many directories available and services that can submit your website automatically for review. We decided to use such a service to take the manual labor out of directory submission and target more than three hundred web sites.

In as little as forty eight hours of the website being submitted through an automated submission service, rankings for particular keywords were negatively impacted and significantly. We lost anywhere from ten to thirty spots on search engine rankings. One might be able to argue that the auto submission was not detectable and therefore could not have had this effect. I disagree as there were no other factors related to SEO that we were working on at the time.

During this time period, my team was not focused on any other type of link building effort. Because the impact on search engine rankings was so immediate and so detrimental, I can only conclude that it was directly caused by the directory submission activity. I suppose there really are no shortcuts to SEO success.

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.

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Michael Fleischner

Michael Fleischner

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