Tag: directory submission services

Round 4 – WL Marketing Directory Submission Review

This is a followup post to the review of WL Marketing’s Directory Submission service.

In the first installement in this series I had reported that my website was submitted to 156 directories. Of those 156 directories, 135 responded by email, 2 listings were approved and 1 was rejected within the first day.

In the second installment in this series I reported that my website had been submitted to a total of 310 directories with 5 approved and 3 rejected within the first week.

In the third installment in this series I reported that my website had been submitted to a total of 469 directories with 34 approved and 4 rejected within two weeks.

This post comes two weeks after the fourth and final submission to directories by WL Marketing. In the fourth week, WL Marketing submitted the website to an additional 200 directories.

The stats as of today are:

669 directory submissions
173 were approved
7 were rejected
489 remain pending

The high level of pending submissions a month into the directory submissions is disheartening. These are submissions that WL Marketing has made, but that the directory website admin has failed to either approve or deny. I will address this fact in a later followup as we get an idea of how many free directories are actually just front ends for paid directories (meaning only the paid submissions are reviewed and approved).

Round 3 – WL Marketing Directory Submission Review

This is a followup post to the review of WL Marketing’s Directory Submission service.

In the first installement in this series I had reported that my website was submitted to 156 directories. Of those 156 directories, 135 responded by email, 2 listings were approved and 1 was rejected within the first day.

In the second installment in this series I reported that my website had been submitted to a total of 310 directories with 5 approved and 3 rejected within the first week.

Today marks the third week of this report, and 15 days since the initial submissions. Last night WL Marketing submitted the third set of submissions to 159 additional directories. This is the first week in which I note that they’ve submitted to “new” directories, or, directories which yet have no PR themselves.

The stats as of this morning are:

469 directory submissions
34 approved
4 rejected

Round 2 – WL Marketing Directory Submission Review

This is a followup post to the initial review of WL Marketing’s Directory Submission service.

In the first installement in this series I had reported that my website was submitted to 156 directories. Of those 156 directories, 135 responded by email, 2 listings were approved and 1 was rejected.

Today marks the second week of this report. Last night WL Marketing submitted the second set of submissions to 154 directories. This time I noted that they came back in and checked for those requiring confirmation, and confirmed the submission, which they should have done the first week.

The stats as of this morning are:

310 directory submissions
5 approved
3 rejected

A review of WL Marketing’s Directory Submission Service

While the value of a directory link can be debated, what cannot be debated is the fact that all back links are at the least a zero gain. Meaning, that it is a rare instance when a link to your website will penalize you. Since I own and operate my own Epic Directory I can vouch that they are still very efficient in pushing link power, providing that the directory or category itself is relevant to the topic of the site.

WL Marketing has several different options when purchasing directory submissions. I chose the 600 directories over a 1 month timeline, which included having a Google email address setup for the submission service. The cost for this service was $40. Over the next several months I am going to report here on the success or non-success of this purchase, giving you my thoughts as they submit and the success rate of such submissions. This will be done in a series of posts.

I would like to state my goals for this submission service. I hoped to gain 180 back links from the 600 submissions, which is a 30% rate. I would consider anything greater than that, a successful sale from this service.

The purchase was made on May 2, 2009 and after review of my site details, and some additional categories added by the staff of WL Marketing, my site was setup for inclusion in their processing.

May 4, 2009

Overnight I received word via email from WL Marketing that they had “updated my account.”  After logging into their backend I found that they had begun the processing of my directory submission to the first set of directories:

2009-05-03 20:18:18 Status changed from New to Processing
2009-05-04 01:42:30 Status changed from Processing to Updated

Available to me was an excel download file that included my login details for accessing the new gmail account. I also received a list of 156 directories that my website was submitted to on the first day. Included in the details was the PR of the homepage of the domain, and the category to which my site was submitted. An initial look at the url’s appeared good. For purposes of privacy to WL Marketing, I will not release the directories they submitted to.

On opening the new gmail account I found I had already received 128 emails, and 7 emails labeled as spam. I first opened the spam folder and immediately confirmed that those 7 emails were in fact valid and I labeled them as not spam.  So, out of 156 submissions last night, 135 of those submissions initially replied.

When submitting to directories or utilizing services such as directory submission, it is important for you to monitor the emails you receive from the directories themselves. Some of them will require you to confirm your submission. Out of the 135 emails I received, I needed to confirm 37 of those, or about 27%. Failing to confirm your submission will lower their success rate. In the excel  file that was provided by WL Marketing I was told that those directories needing confirmations had already been done, but I was unable to confirm that via emails within the gmail account. In each case where I confirmed the listing, I received an additional email confirming that fact, so I have to doubt if it was done properly.

From the initial 156 submissions, two listings were approved and one rejected within 9 hours. The rejected one was because the site was not Thailand related… which of course means, my site should never have submitted to that country related directory.  Of the two accepted submissions one of those was through the 37 submission confirmation that I had made earlier.