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How to Get a Free Listing on Google

(November 2, 2003 - Westchester County, NY) Although most search engines and directories today require some form of payment to list your site, there are still some important free listings available. Some of these are Directories, many of which are edited by humans such as Yahoo and The Open Directory Project. Others are “Crawlers” or “Spiders”, like Google and MSN.

The most important free listing you should get is with Google. Google is the most popular search tool right now, and Google results power the results of other popular searches, including Yahoo and AOL (at this time).

You can manually submit your site to Google and wait for its spider to get around to indexing you, but the preferred method of getting into Google is to let it find you all by itself. It does this by finding links to your site on other sites that are already in its index.

How do you get a link from a site on its index? There are two primary ways: you can ask another site that you know is indexed in Google to add a link to you, or you can apply to one of the Directories that Google checks frequently, such as Yahoo and The Open Directory Project.

But didn’t I just tell you above that Yahoo’s results are based on Google? Yes, I did, and I’ll explain.

When you do a search on Yahoo, most users usually use the default search box that comes up on the site, labeled “Search the Web.” On the results page, the first listings are “Sponsor Results.” These are paid positions that we’ll cover later in another article. Just below these are the “Web Results.” These are from Google.

Seems paradoxical, doesn’t it? You want to get on Yahoo in order to get on Google so people find you on Yahoo. Here’s how it works – there are another set of results, based on Yahoo’s Directory, the one that’s edited by humans. Look at the top of the Yahoo results page and you’ll find a set of tabs; the first one, which is the active tab by default, is labeled “Web.” Next to it is a tab labeled “Images,” and the third one over is labeled “Directory.” That’s the one, the Directory, that Google crawls to find new sites.

The bad news is that Yahoo requires a nearly $300 fee just for it’s editors to consider your site for their directory, and once they list you they charge you the same amount annually to keep you listed. An exception is made for nonprofits, who can submit their sites and remain listed for free at this time. But businesses have to pay, and payment doesn’t guarantee inclusion.

The good news is that The Open Directory Project charges no fees, and it’s also a very important Directory that Google indexes. You can go to http://www.dmoz.org to submit your site. It pays to read their site guidelines carefully and to craft your submission with care. A poorly written submission can ruin your chance at a listing here. The Open Directory Project is staffed by volunteer editors, and there is often a backlog of sites to review for submission (I can vouch for this, I’m one of those volunteers!).

Be patient waiting for you listing to appear – it can take months in a category where the editors are inundated with candidates. Resubmitting too soon will only put your site back at the end of the line, not to mention annoy the editors, so give it at least 4 months or more before worrying that you weren’t accepted.

What can you do in the meantime? An inbound link campaign can help Google find you.

You should be careful NOT to get into “link farms,” which are sites that serve no purpose except to link to a whole bunch of other sites. Google’s programmers saw through this trick right away, and now may penalize or even ban sites that participate in these programs.

Instead, you need to look for high quality, pertinent inbound links from sites that are indexed. They needn’t be top ranked, as long as you can find them somewhere in Google. A link is high quality and pertinent when the site linking to yours is related, relevant and complimentary.

For example, if your web site is about window draperies, complimentary sites might be devoted to shades, home décor items or window cleaning supplies. A good rule of thumb is to try to get links from sites that might be of interest to your target audience, without being direct competitors.

Usually, the site owner where you request a link will ask you to exchange a link back to their site. This is a fair request, and it can help both your sites as well as your site visitors, since you are directing them to a relevant resource. It’s a good idea to set up a resources page on your site for this purpose.

Being listed in Google does not mean you will be at the top of the Google results for your key terms, but it’s a beginning. If you'd like to get into a more aggressive Search Engine Positioning Campaign, please contact us - we'd love to help, and we have the track record to prove we can.