Submitting to directories

Awarded at Toronto "Ultra Advanced SEO Symposium" Nov. 2005.

How to possibly make your website less popular

Google is not a human. Google cannot look at a web page that contains all sorts of mixed information and make a rational decision as to what the true content of the site is.

Google does not know that apples, pears, oranges, lemons are all fruits in fact today I think it does but thats another story.

So unless the web page is designed to talk about fruits in very specific ways such a site could never appear on page 1 or page 2 for a search about fruits. It might appear on page 999 where no-one will ever see it.

The Internet world talks about themes being important and they are. It depends what you understand by theme.

Today this very simply means to me that a website or even a web page has to be as specific as possible around a chosen idea or product or system or whatever is being discussed. Not every SEO would agree with me here and many have long theories to attempt to explain a theme and how to build the theory into the practical website. I thought about these theme theories for months and never could get my mind around them in a practical sense and gave up and plumped for what to me seemed common sense.

In the case of my project I considered it would be wrong in the same website (notice I said website not a single web page within the website) to talk about pumps at the same time I was really talking about ponds which is quite a large subject in its own right. I assumed I would decrease my webs popularity if I included these two separate ideas albeit they were both related to water gardening as a bigger theme on the same website.

I did not want to take the risk of straying from a theme and made a fundamental decision to introduce a totally separate website for pumps rather than tack on these same pages to the ponds website making it a much bigger website.

Before I knew better I would certainly have made one large website with many pages because this would be cheaper much cheaper.

To this day I cannot be absolutely sure this is the better approach but I do think it is. It is certainly not wrong and it does give me the chance to create many external links as well as internal.

There was another reason. I reckoned based upon my readings about search engines that links or recommendations within the same website but from different web pages would count for less weight than recommendations from a totally different website. Experts disagree here.

My view was based upon thinking as a human. Somehow I think if all my relatives were voting for me this would not have the same weight as total strangers voting for me. I could be wrong here. I played safe and took the route of strangers voting rather than relatives. This point will come up again later. Take note however that every page on every site has useful content on it. This is what is critical. Namely information that is useful to interested searchers. This is surely what people are hoping to get from a SERP.

You can do a lot to make yourself popular using links. This helps to understand why some consider short web pages are better than long web pages. You can make yourself less popular using long pages because the opportunity to create links is lessened.

Let me remind you again. Content is what is important view your page from the perspective of a searcher. Every time.

Tony Roocroft

Submitting to directories that are possibly not themed to your website might hurt you, especially if Google decides that the directory linking to your site is a spam, or an artificial link structure. You need links to your website, as many as possible, but our feeling is that qualified links will count far better in your favour over the long term.