1. Ads on the site
2. Site’s design
3. Site’s PR (unfortunately)
4. Site’s niche (weight loss, loans, insurance site get least approval – 10-20%)
5. Affiliate links – amazon / ebay affiliates are not liked.
6. Top level domain or subdomain
7. Keywords in title (any repetition, too many words etc. might get less approval rate).
8. Description – short descriptions get less approval rate, descriptions with phone numbers, URL inside descriptions are also not liked by many.
9. PR of the directory (higher PR directories have lots of submissions everyday and can take many months to approve, they tend to have higher rejection rates), newer directories approve faster.

10. Category of the site. Some sites have a ‘clear cut’ category and there is no confusion. Shopping -> Clothing type of categories are probably the easiest, others are quite ‘vague’. Locksmiths, janitors etc. can go in shopping -> home & garden -> trade services or business -> services the directory editors might disagree with submitter’s choice.

11. Directory List – if a directory list doesn’t remove directories that are ‘obviously not approving links’, the approval rate can go down.

What went wrong?

As expected for any method that was making money some people started abusing directory submissions. It takes less than 20 minutes to get a new directory up and running with some commonly available directory scripts. People started making 100s of directories and guaranteed directory listings were hugely popular (some people still love those). When people start selling links blatantly to manipulate Google’s algorithm it was bound to take some step and it made examples out of some big directory names. Besides this, quality of directories has gone down significantly with each directory looking like a cheap clone of another one.

Are they really dead?

There are two type of people who say directory submission doesn’t work. We have already talked about the ignorant type who are just repeating what they heard elsewhere without bothering to test the hypothesis. The other type has tried directory submissions and have seen a decline in ROI (return on investment) on directory submission. I won’t dispute this; directory submissions can hardly move a keyword in SERPs if it has good competition. What these webmasters need is to outsource directory submission to people who can do it at cheaper rates. You need to find people who are still submitting to directories manually and who are not in turn outsourcing it to others thereby increasing the overall cost.

One can still get a PR 2 or PR 3 with 1000 directory submissions and can still reach first page if competition is not very high. I will ask directory submission bashers to try it out for one of their sites and then make an opinion about it.

100 submission package is the smallest and can be used by new customers to try out the service, priced at just $8 this is one of the cheapest professional directory submission package. There are other packages like 500 and 1000 submission package but highlight is monthly submission package where a website is submitted to 10 new directories everyday as the directories are announced. This is a unique package not offered by many because it requires constant monitoring of forums and directory lists and there is no way of automating this entire process. This is the best value package from GetLinksPro. Do try out the service.