Rosalind - 2:02 pm on Aug 12, 2009 (gmt 0)

Directory owners often complain about keyword-stuffed titles and the way submitters rarely read the guidelines:

[webmasterworld.com...]

At the same time we often hear people speculating that directory submission is devalued and virtually useless for SEO or traffic. Often these are the same people who simply don't understand how to make a successful submissions to the directories which count.

I think directory owners and script developers are partly to blame for this state of affairs, and it's all down to the rejection emails. Or, more often, the total lack of them. A lot of owners shy away from sending any emails, for fear of angry responses from submitters. However, when these emails are sent out they often consist of catch-all rejections: sorry, not for us, read the guidelines. They're not informative. So someone who makes bad submissions that could easily be fixed could end up none the wiser for tens or even hundreds of rejections.

For directory owners as a group, there's a lot to be gained by improving rejection emails. I'm not suggesting writing custom emails to everyone. That would be madness. But for most editors, it's easy to identify the most common reasons for declining a submission, and to stick them in 3 or 4 broad categories. So here's my suggestion: develop a few different templates for rejection emails.

I've been using such a system for a while, and when it does get a response it's more likely to be positive than negative. Also, consider if this conversation could happen:

Client: I'm not happy. You promised to submit my site to 500 directories.

SEO: Yes, the work is done. You can see the responses in your inbox.

Client: Yes, and I'm furious. Half of the links were rejected for "keyword stuffing", whatever that is, and the other half for being off-topic for that directory. I'm not hiring you again!

SEO: Err... Can I fix your meta tags?