Directory Penalty

I have a few websites which are online directories. After the recent PR update about a week ago. I found that the PRs of all these directories drop to zero.

In fact, I am not the kind of person who cares about the PR so much. What I really are about is the ranking. This gives me the real panic. I found that the index page of one of the directory, which is rank in the first few positions in both Google and Yahoo for my targeted keyword, is deindexed on both search engines.

I have lost a lot of visitor (and of course money). Yet, I am trying to improve my sites. I will add some more articles to the directory and make the directory only part of the website. I hope this moves will help you to get the ranking back.

I will need to work on it for a while and I will see if there can be any improvement in ranking!

Article Marketing and Direct Traffic

I think most of you will know what article marketing is. You are writing some articles and submit them to article directories. There is a resource box in the article and you will put the URLs of your websites into it.

As a matter of fact, article marketing is a great way of boost link popularity. It can cerainly have some good effects on your off page SEO.

However, my opinion is that you should focus on the direct traffic from article submission rather than the SEO effects. Taking some articles I submit to ezinearticles.com for example. I find that on average one article will drive about 100 clicks to my sites. This is quite good. Imagine you have 1000 articles, you will get 10000 clicks.

This also tells the importance of submitting quality articles. Remember, only by submitting quality articles you will be able to enjoy the direct traffic.