Directory Information Pages

Can you tell me how this works?

[dfrancis]

I'm looking at an SEO firm that uses DIP's, directory information pages, to achieve high rankings. They also modify meta data and title. Then they submit twice a months to the "major search engines". What do you think about the use of DIP's and the frequent submission process. Is there a danger in this being considered spam? Thanks

[jimbeetle]

Hi dfrancis,

Welcome to WW.

"Directory Information Pages" sound suspiciously like the old 'doorway' or 'gateway' pages, those with no inherent purpose in a web site except to draw traffic for specific keywords. Nothing wrong in the concept itself -- making a page that draws traffic -- but if wrongly used can get a site into trouble.

Submitting to search engines twice a month? Well, once submitted there's no reason to resubmit and continued resubmissions might actually hurt.

Best bet for SEO is to read the forums here at WW. Since Google drives most traffic these days you might want to start with the Google Knowledge Base [webmasterworld.com] and then check out Brett's Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone [webmasterworld.com].

Read around the forums a bit before you decide whether to go with an SEO firm or, if you do, which factors are important and what an SEO firm should do for you.

Jim

[dfrancis]

Thanks for the response. What do you mean by "wrongly used"? Can you give me an example?

[jimbeetle]

There's no one real definition of doorway pages, but for general purposes, let's say they are pages outside the normal structure of your website that are SEO'd for different keyword combinations (big fuzzy red widgets, red widgets big and fuzzy, fuzzy red big widgets, red fuzzy big widgets, etc.). Their only purpose in life is to be attractive to certain search engines.

Doorways were one of the big buzzwords a few years ago and it wasn't uncommon to see comments like "I made 250 doorway pages last night" with this whatever type of SEO software. The SEs got a bit tired of it and started to boot doorways out of their indexes.

But again, there is nothing inherently wrong with optimizing pages for specific keywords or keyphrases -- that's part of what SEO is. But it's best that these pages are organically part of the site:

Index: Widgets
Sections: Red ¦ Blue ¦ Green
Subsections: Fuzzy ¦ Sharp ¦ Dull

Something along those lines. If an SEO firm offers to take your existing pages and modify the titles, heads, copy and such to better conform to current thinking that's one thing; if the offer is for them to produce a certain number of doorway pages (according to the package you purchase) for you to just slap up on your site, well, that's something you should be leery of.

Again, you found a great place to learn about SEO. Read, read and read.

[layer8]

I use the directory information pages concept.

I guess it can have many reasons, if they are talking about a reciprocal link campaign managed via a tightly themed directory structure then this is a great thing.

The thing that puts me off is the resubmissions....that sounds very, very suspect.

If your inbound links have been strategically placed, why would you need to submit? You would be picked up on a robot crawl.

Maybe ask them for expamples of work, that would be the best bet - there are good firms around, look for ethical firms, not cowboy firms.

[jimbeetle]

layer8,

From what I saw when I searched Google for "directory information pages" (with quotes) I don't think that they are places to store reciprocal links (they might be, it's kind of hard to tell from the SEO firm's description -- or lack thereof). But in fact, links, or their importance, aren't mentioned at all.

There are a couple of other things would make me a bit antsy about these directory information pages, but it's up to each person to decide which way they want to go.