There is a large debate in the search engine optimization (SEO) community whether utilizing automated directory submissions to distribute articles and web pages across the internet is beneficial. While this debate is continuing, more automated submitter software is being developed and released.
How Do These Work?
Automated directory submission software takes your login information on many (sometimes into the thousands) social bookmarking or article directory sites and logs you in. It directly routes to the submission page and submits an article, blog post or whole web page to that site.
Is This Advantageous
Although most of these websites frown upon their use, they are quite handy and beneficial. It saves hours of time from having to manually input these articles and web pages into another website. It saves further time by signing you up to the site all at once. With thousands of social bookmarking and article directory sites, it can literally take days to submit one article to each.
The articles and web page submissions give you more exposure across the internet through backlinks as well as users simply reading what you have to say. This will entice more individuals to visit your site which could lead to higher sales and conversions (if you have advertisements).
The Consequences of its Use
Since most bookmarking and article directory sites frown upon its use, they will terminate your account with them if they discover this is submission method is being used. Some even employ bots to verify this wasn’t added by an automated article submitter. Also the Google indexing bots could get suspicious if an article or web page is suddenly submitted to hundreds of sites at once. This could affect your PageRank and in turn, traffic.
The SEO Community
The SEO community is torn on the use of this type of software. On the one hand, users believe it gives them more time to improve on their articles and focus on high-quality content. Others believe that manual submissions provide higher-quality backlinks which can improve your Google PageRank score.
While there is a major debate as to the benefit of utilizing these sites, the wheel continues to turn. New contributors to the internet find it difficult to manually submit to so many directories so they turn to these automated programs, thus creating a market. As technology helps everything become more automated, perhaps these directory submitters will be built into websites.
