Automatic directories (no human editing)

[serenoo]

I found 100 directories where you can submit your website and your oneway backlink appears immediatly with no human editor approval.
Probably such backlinks will not help you a lot, but my question is: can they hurt you?

[aristotle]

Before making any submissions, you should try to determine if all of these directories are part of a "network" owned by the same person. One clue is if they all have the same basic design and layout, and the same advertisements. You can also check Whois info to see if they are all on the same server. If they are a network, I suggest you avoid them.

If you do decide to submit, I recommend that you not submit the same page to more than a few of them, and also that you use different anchor text and descriptions. This is because if they are too similar, the Google algo will recognize that they weren't naturally acquired and might discount them.

As for any potential harm, there is an old argument that no link can hurt a site, because otherwise a competitor could hurt its rankings by creating the wrong kind of links. But I don't know for sure if this argument is valid or not.

[serenoo]

I know for sure they are from the same owner because I submitted my website to one of them and I received an email saying to submit to the other 99 directories. The problem is if google can detect they are owned by the same person. I noticed they are very similar in layout but different template, colors, advertisment, content, external links. They are not interlinked. If I look at whois many of them are from the same owner and many other are clientDeleteProhibited (so nobody can get the owner). The hosting server is almost the same for all of them (I checked only 10 of them), but someone different. I should look at the ip, but it is very hard to make all these controls. Some of them are created on 2006, other on 2008. Some of them have pr0, and other pr2,...
My temptation is that they have my keyword in /directory/subdirectory/mykeyord/ with few websites listed. That will help me a lot if they do not hurt me.
Do you have further advices?
Why if they are from the same owner they could hurt me? (I do not link them).

[aristotle]

On some directory networks, if you submit to just one directory, the same listing is automatically copied to all the others. This would create numerous links with the same anchor text, description, etc, which MIGHT put the site at risk for a penalty.

But if you're sure that won't happen, then there probably isn't much risk if you do the submissions carefully. By this, I mean don't submit the same page to more than two or three, and use different anchor text and descriptions. Also, you should spread the submissions out over time

[FranticFish]

If these directories are like the ones I've seen then they are junk. No internal PR usually as a rule, just MFA 'SEO-friendly' general directories. I do see sites ranking with them, but never for anything competitive. In fact, in more competitive markets when I look at link profiles I even get the impression that fairly small numbers of junk links count against you in that they damage trust for the term used in the anchors. I could say vary the anchors a lot, but who's to say Google's indexing of these sites will end up with a higher proportion of one anchor attributed to you (i.e. not all get into the index so your attempts to vary it backfire)? Same could well be said for the descriptions. By the time you've invested that much effort into 100 links that could well be worthless at best, perhaps you could have found a couple of really good links?