After “Add your site to Search Engines” I’ll show you how to get some additional traffic. Adding your website to a Blog catalogue or Top List can get you some additional traffic.
But don’t expect to much from it, especially Top Lists tend to have a quite low traffic effect (it depends on situation, in some situations it can give a good amount of traffic but is quite rarely the case).
Blog catalogues
Adding your Blog to Blog catalogues has several other advantages, besides traffic only. Blog catalogues are updated quite often and this means, Googlebot is crawling Blog catalogues more often and this way will also add your blog faster to the index than it would otherwise. This is especially important if you just started blogging or having creating a website and have a low page rank/update frequency.
Another advantage is that blog catalogues have a high number of blogs in their database and usually also have a search function, so chances are higher that people will find your blog there and visit it (if your content is good enough).
Blog catalogues are especially useful for new websites or blogs as there is usually rarely a requirement to be added to the catalogue (other than that you shouldn’t have content which violates against the blog catalogues term of service)
Top Lists
Top Lists on other side, are usually only for certain categories. For example if your blog or website is about a certain type of game (i.e. online games) then top lists can be quite a good idea, while having a business blog usually won’t profit much from it.
Other than blog catalogues, Top Lists are more for websites which already have a certain amount of traffic (let’s say at least 400-1000 unique visitors daily). Reason for this is, that the top lists either use clicks or page views to determinate your ranking within the top list. If you just don’t have any traffic on your website or blog, then your blog won’t be visible in the first pages of the top list.
Visitor vs. Click/Vote Top Lists
- Visitors: Counts unique visitors per day/week/certain period of time
- Click/Vote: Requires your visitors to click on a small banner and press vote on the Top Lists website
In my opinion the Visitor counting Top Lists are better, because they tell more about the success of a website than clicks, because it doesn’t require any interaction from your visitors. And most visitors won’t even bother to vote for your site.
Sadly, most of the Top Lists still use the Click/Vote variant. Depending on the topic of your blog or website, you need to look for Top Lists which fit for your category.
So if it’s possible try to avoid Click/Vote Top Lists unless you’re sure to have good potion of loyal users who’d really clicking on the vote buttons and vote for you.
Not all top lists/blog catalogues will be beneficial!
But be careful! Don’t just sign up for every Blog Catalogue/Top List you found! Some of the Top Lists and Blog Catalogues abuse some flaws in the Google Search Engine which allows them to highjack your content/page ranking which in long terms hurts your search engine placement/rank. This method is called “url-hijacking” by redirecting the users via 302 redirection code (temporary moved) instead of 301 (permanently moved).
The url-hijacking topic is a big one and would exceed this post, so I will only give a short explanation. Many of such malicious Top Lists and Blog Catalogues will redirect the visitors by using redirection instead of directly linking. It could look similar to “http://www.blogrankings.com/out.php?url=http://www.yourdomain.com”
This is one indicator if the page is trying to hijack your website or not. In this case it’s better not to use this service. In worst case, they could replace the links to your website with theirs. So instead links in Google search engine to show “www.yourdomain.com” will show “http://www.blogrankings.com/out.php?url=http://www.exoticobsession.com". This way they could steal all your visitors who come via search engine to your page.
One such “bad” blog catalogue is http://www.blogrankings.com. We suggest not to register there, if you don’t want to risk your content to be url-hijacked!
Important note: When entering your website to different web catalogues, directories or top lists, make sure to use different site description on every one of them. Google may penalize you if there are same descriptions on different sites.
List of Blog Catalogues/Top Lists
Catalogues/Directories (Good)
Catalogues/Directories (Bad)
Top Lists (Good)
Top Lists (Bad)
If you’re unsure if a top list/catalogue is trying to use hijacking techniques, check out About-Hijacking and check it. Simply copy an URL of one of the blogs or websites there into the text box and click “check link”. That’s all.
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