Update: We do not own EasySubmits anymore. Please feel free to leave a feedback to the new management that already took it to the next level by adding new features such as social bookmarking and link classifieds. As for us, we find it more entertaining to build new services and spend time learning affiliate marketing…

One of our most visited websites is a free directory submission site – EasySubmits.

We came up with an idea to create EasySubmits while submitting our own sites to the directories. It took forever to fill out the forms, especially find the right categories in the drop down boxes. This is when we decided to automate it. Even though there are other desktop applications, we thought that we could bring something new to the table. Something that with a better tracking and availability from anywhere as long as there is a browser and internet connection. We were not satisfied with the results after trying a few desktop applications since most of them are pretty complicated to figure out, don’t work or crash half the time.

At first we just put it out online. It was not available for public for a few months and we thought about starting a directory submission service. Since we do custom web projects and have a lot on the plate, we changed our mind about submission service and made it public. It took off almost instantly. In just a few weeks we had so much traffic that we had to dump a shared hosting and move to a dedicated one. Now some sql tables, such as tracking, have over 1,000,000 records. EasySubmits gets 200-500 new user registrations every day and around 10,000 daily page views.

There were a few problems on the way and some are still there. Directories tend to go up and down on a regular basis. With over 500 listings it is hard to keep up and assure quality of the list. Some directories become paid as they grow and attract more traffic, others get broken with the corrupted databases, smarty errors or just disappear and the rest keep on changing their captcha settings. It also happens that directories go down for a day or two while switching hosting or having problems with the server load. These are the main issues that we have to deal with.

Now I would like to go over directory submissions in general.

Many people tend to believe that directory submissions do not have any effect on SEO anymore. While it doesn’t make much sense to spend days and days to submit, we believe that it still has a certain effect. The main argument is that people don’t see much links listed in google from the directories by typing “link:url” and this is true. You will not see every single link, however, you should still see some. Besides, search engines do not show every link that they know about. Another factor is the amount of pages that the directories have. When you submit a link, it usually goes to the top of the list, and as more and more links get added, your listing gets pushed down to further pages. Yes, those pages are PR0 in most of the cases, but being around relevant content still passes some value.

Many people do the submissions wrong. They use the same anchor text or irrelevant anchor text. Do the keyword research, go towards the keywords for which you want to rank good and change the title (anchor text) every 50 submissions or so… This way you will get good ranking for the keywords and search engines will not think that you are trying to spam them with the same link titles. For instance, if you are trying to get higher on search engines for “florida realtor”, don’t use “florida realtor” all the time. Make a few variations like “realtor in florida”, “florida real estate”, “real estate services in florida”, etc.

Just to prove the point, we did an experiment once. We got a new site and submitted to all of the directories with a few relevant keywords. In a week we had no backlinks showing in google, however, we were already indexed. With some onsite optimization we were already on page 8. Two week later, some directories showed up and we had 2 backlinks, however, we were already on page 2. It is up to you, but we believe that directory submissions still have some effect, not as much as few years back , but it still helps.

Some people also say that it is bad to submit to over 10 directories a day. We don’t think it matters since the directories have different approval time. While some may list you the same day, others wouldn’t approve your site for months. That is besides the fact that the links will be picked up by search engines at different times as spiders don’t crawl the same page over and over every day. We just chose 100 since we get bored to submit all day and the number works for us. What’s more important is continuous link building.

Another point that you may find useful – do not use primary email address for directory submissions. Many directories do send spam! Register one that you will be using for submissions and commenting on the sites that send spam.

These are pretty much the points that we had to share with a few users who would email us and ask for some advice. We hope you can find this information useful.

Please let us know if you have any problems with the site or have any suggestions.

Thank you and enjoy EasySubmits!