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Written by Chuck Hiatt
February 21, 2006
I have been spending a lot of my time evaluating SEO alternatives lately and have come across something interesting. I was advised that if I create multiple D.I.P.'s (Directory Information Pages) and submit them twice per month to all search engines that I could be assured of top 20 listings in most of the top 15 search engines and top 10 in the second and third tier search engines. Also that the higher the number of D.I.P.'s, the higher the ranking.
This seems a little too good to be true to me. Could I get some input on this issue from some you experts out there? Thanks in advance!
Chuck Hiatt
Promogear.com, Inc.
Written by Joel Lesser February 22, 2006
DIP's can be defined by a web page that is created for the sole purpose of achieving high organic listings in the search engines. This page is usually a list of links to the client's site which would include keywords and keyphrases in an attempt to generate synthetic link popularity. DIP's typically offer no usefulness or value to end users and is considered to be spam. DIP's are most often only published for search engines and not always visible to the end user. DIP's are sometimes referred to as gateway, attraction, envelope, or hallway pages.
Chuck, there are no guarantees in life with the exception of death and taxes. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
Do not confuse DIP's with relevant linking for the end user. Right on Google's published webmaster guidelines, Google states "Have other relevant sites link to yours". If you read Google's patent, you will see the Google engineers who wrote this patent refer to "obtaining links without editorial discretion as an attempt to spam...".
Chuck and fellow LED'ers, you never want to do anything that will give the search engines a reason to downgrade your rankings. Ask yourself this simple question: "Would I take part in X activity if the search engines didn't exist? Does this benefit my end user?". If the answer is no, don't participate in schemes such as DIPs and similar methods to try to cheat the search engines. You might get a short term bump in your rankings by taking part in gamesmanship such as DIPs, but it's only a matter of time before the search engines spot the activity, and then your site runs the risk of being downgraded or "sandboxed". Reversing downgraded rankings is not easy. It's not worth the risk to participate in unethical practices such as DIPs.
Google says "have other relevant sites link to yours" and so there is nothing wrong with publishing a useful directory of relevant links that benefits your end user. It looks good to publish relevant links that do not necessarily have to be reciprocal links. But make sure links that you publish and links that you seek from other sites are relevant and benefit your end user. That means a loan consolidation site should not request a link to a site that sells automotive accessories.. a site that publishes tips on home improvement should not link to a gambling site, and so on.
If you keep your linking relevant, over time, your rankings will slowly (naturally) climb as junk sites get downgraded. Sometimes, your search engines rankings might appear to be going up when they are actually simply being affected by other sites that have been downgraded.
Stay away from chicanery and gamesmanship such as DIPs. When you link to and request links from other sites that benefit your end user, combined with keeping your content fresh and useful for the end user, you should enjoy long term success.
Best Regards,
Joel Lesser
LinksManager.com
Written by Mike Banks Valentine February 22, 2006
Your first clue to bad information here is that you were advised to create D.I.P.s, an acronym probably created by a company that has a large network of D.I.P.s and makes their living promoting them. They think you are a DIP too - don't fall for it.
Second, there is no need to submit the pages to the search engines. Submissions have been entirely unnecessary for at least the past three years as search engine spiders regularly crawl and re-crawl sites. The more often you add new content (on a regular schedule) the more often the site is re-visited by the crawlers. If you do any type of article marketing, online press release distribution, or blogging - your site will be re-crawled on about the same schedule at which you routinely add that content to your site.
Your post to LED got you a link from the last issue, now posted in the archive and re-crawled often due to frequent updates and high popularity. Submissions are not necessary unless you've never gotten an external link, never add anything new to your site and never do any marketing or posting to discussion lists. Expect the search engines to revisit your site this week because you posted to LED.
> I could be assured of top 20 listings in
> most of the top 15 search engines...
There are four search engines that send 99 percent of referred visitors to your site. The following numbers are drawn from about a dozen client sites I have access to server traffic statistics for. Google - sending an average of 60 to 70 percent of search engine referred traffic, Yahoo - sending an average of 10 to 15 percent of search engine referred traffic, MSN - sending an average of 5 to 7 percent of search engine referred traffic and Ask - sending an average of less than 1 percent of all search engine referred
traffic.
> ... and top 10 in the second and
> third tier search engines.
The above are top tier engines, the rest (on any tier) are irrelevant to referral traffic. Is there any reason you can think of to pay even the slightest bit of attention to search engines that refer less than 1 percent of your traffic? Second and third tier engines could rank you #1 and send dribbles and drips of 2 or 3 visitors, sometimes, on a good day, if you are lucky.
> Also that the higher the number of D.I.P.s,
> the higher the ranking.
Yes, DIP ranking. Forget the DIPs.
> This seems a little too
> good to be true to me.
There you go, you knew all along.
Mike Banks Valentine
realityseo.com
 also see Hyperlinks in the Old LED Archives in the Other category.Written by Dirk Johnson February 22, 2006
Chuck, great post.
Having been around this business for almost 10 years now, I had never heard of "Directory Information Pages" (DIPs), so I jumped onto Google, Yahoo, and MSN to find out. There was not a single reference to this term on the first page of the search results on any of these engines. So you've brought an emerging buzz-term to our attention. The challenge is to find out what to do with it, as you've asked us to do.
Since I don't really know what you are referring to, I will make some generalizations, and add that these may or may not apply to DIPs. However.....
When we see that someone touts a "shortcut" to top SEO results (not you Chuck, but whoever put this forward to you), it should throw up all kinds of red flags. What is their reason for saying it? Are they selling a book, a seminar, or services based upon their shortcut? Or maybe they are just another ambitious SEO trying hard to make a name for themselves, so they concoct something and run it up the flagpole at the forums. Maybe it's a just a decoy.
Until I get more info, I'd put DIPs into the "SEO fad du jour" category. There have been dozens of these fads over the years, all guaranteed to get a site to the tops of the SERPs with little work. Link farms, PR games, keyword stuffing, you name it.
What happens with easy fads is that a lot of people try them. The easier it is to do, the more people that try. There are only 10 results on the first page of a search report. If 50 sites are all competing for the same term, and do the exact same thing, then 40 of them will fail to get the intended (promised?) result. At that point, the trick is useless, if it ever had any value at all.
One rather well-known SEO specialist seems to have bought into one of these fads. This person was recently touting that a handful of "good" links is about all it takes to get to the top. If you buy their seminar, they'll tell you exactly how you can do it, too. Maybe their "special recipe" does work for them, and maybe it will work for others. But in looking at hundreds of situations over the years, I haven't yet seen anything like this work against well-established competitors.
It's my guess that anyone with that kind of proven, repeatable traction with search engines would not be telling others how to do it for a small seminar fee (where participants would then get the info and run out and tell others on the forums, for free). Instead, wouldn't they be spending all their time putting up a lot of sites and getting very, very wealthy on the traffic, while completely avoiding any public disclosure? The revenue from a few seminar attendees is a pittance compared with the revenue available from being able to put up sites that go directly to the tops of the SERPs for any highly-competitive term they choose to attack.
If I could do what they seem to claim, then I'd build sites that quickly rank #1 for "real estate", "travel", "mortgage", "insurance", "brittany speers", and a few others, and then I'd go play golf at a real nice country club. So tell me...why would they tell the rest of us how they did it? Or are they just selling some kind of digital hope? Who knows, but it is very curious and it leaves a lot of unanswered questions.
Easy tricks have no legs. Once they become pervasive, then you need a new trick. If it is based on fakery, then it risks penalties. A lot of people have followed these tricks right into the depths of the search results, once the fix comes in at the engines. The engineers read the forums, too, looking for popular shortcuts.
I prefer to let this volatile stuff boil off. It all has a half-life. What's left are the basics that have worked for years, and continue to work. The problem is that putting up a site that covers the basics well is a lot of work, and it takes time. That's what drives people to chase shortcuts.
Does any of this apply to "Directory Information Pages"? I have no idea. We all have to distill what's being said, determine a strategy, and then pursue the tactics that will get us there. That's what makes the world go round. Some people make the right choices, and for others, it does not work out as planned. From what I see, and for what it's worth, it's the basics that continue to pay stable long-term dividends, but there are no guarantees. Until I see solid and pervasive proof otherwise, that's the road I am on.
Best regards,
Dirk Johnson, Partner - Operations
DomainDrivers LLC
Written by David Spahr February 24, 2006
I don't think submitting your sites twice a month is necessary or even a good idea. Some smaller specialized search sites and DMOZ may be worth submitting to once but Google, Yahoo, and MSN will find you without submitting and probably index them in a way that has nothing to do with how often you submit. Most bigger searches all share information and get their info that way.
A lot of time spent submitting to them is probably time wasted. See Bruce Clay's Search Engine Relationship Chart. I think this may be out of date but it certainly gives you the idea.
David Spahr
Stereoviews.Com
Written by Lee Roberts February 24, 2006 In LED, 2101, Chuck Hiatt asks about directory information pages. Directory information pages (D.I.P.) is a term used by Internet Advancement in Seattle, WA.
While this term may sound enticing, it reminds me of Traffic Power. ALL Traffic Power's clients were banned by Google. Matt Cutts confirms this in his blog.
Traffic Power (now calling themselves "First Place" and located at 1p.com) builds Web pages on their servers and links those Web pages to their client's sites.
According to Internet Advancement, only a handful of people within their organization ever sees a D.I.P. page and you will never find these pages within the search engine results. They say that this is possible due to a trick they know for using the robots.txt file to redirect the search engines to their clients' sites.
According to instructions on how to setup a robots.txt file, the robots.txt file is for exclusions only. Those exclusions should be formated as:
Disallow: /help disallows both /help.html and /help/index.html
... whereas Disallow: /help/ would disallow /help/index.html, but allow /help.html.
Robots.text files cannot include instructions to and visit other Web sites.
While Google supports Allow and wildcards (*.cgi) in the robots.txt file, this does not mean that it is correct by any means. The robots.txt file is for exclusions only. Anyways, I digress here so now it's time to get back to the real topic.
On http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html, Google states
the following:
"Choose wisely.
"While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry. Google is one way to do that of course. You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press, including this article on one particularly aggressive SEO. While Google doesn't comment on specific companies, we've encountered firms calling themselves SEOs who follow practices that are clearly beyond the pale of accepted business behavior. Be careful."
Clearly, for Google to have that reference, which discusses Internet Advancement, they are implying a statement of "don't deal with this company."
So, as one of my favorite movies says, "Run Forest, Run" when Internet Advancement calls for your money.
Sincerely,
Lee Roberts
applepiecart.com
Written by Tim Mullen February 24, 2006
This link ties DIPs to spam penalties: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3325301
Tim Mullen
<Moderator Comment>
Just FYI, the article Tim mentions above is by Shari Thurow (written in March '04), whose post on this topic is next... -adam
Written by Shari Thurow February 24, 2006 Hi everyone-
This is in response to the thread about Directory Information Pages (DIP).
Everyone, my advice is to do business with from this company at your own risk. I believe the company is named Traffic Power, who have renamed themselves First Place or 1P.com. This firm was involved in a class-action lawsuit for shady practices. They have renamed their DIP pages to SEE pages (search engine entry pages).
SEOconsultants.com put up a number of pages on their site, and then removed them, about this firm. You can still see some of the pages if you search one Google for them and look at the cache.
Here is a link to one of the BBB reports: http://www.vegasbbb.org/commonreport.html?compid=67154
Sincerely,
Shari Thurow, Webmaster/Marketing Director
Grantastic Designs, Inc.
Written by Beth Earle February 24, 2006
This is what I love about the LED!
In trying to decide which post to respond to yesterday, I ended up picking the outsourcing issue, because I knew (yes, *knew*) there'd be a ton of great, on-target responses (much better than mine would have been) to the DIP-PY issue. And there were!
Don't know if anybody's said it lately, but we're really lucky to have a such a great group of people to share ideas with. I really don't want to contemplate what life would be like without my fellow LED'ers (or without you, Adam).
Wishing a wonderful day to every single LED'er for making this such a wonderful resource,
Beth Earle
pilotfishseo.com
Written by John Barendrecht February 27, 2006 Perhaps DIP’s are not spam pages but you may want to read Matt Cutts’ article “Confirming a Penalty”. Google says “you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire.” In the article, http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/confirming-a-penalty/, he states “I can confirm that Google has removed traffic-power.com and domains promoted by Traffic Power from our index because of search engine optimization techniques that violated our webmaster guidelines.”
Best regards,
John Barendrecht
Centralhome.com Company Inc.
I was just called yesterday by a company that also seems to fit the TP profile, so I thought I would also let people know about them. They are Aeonetinc.com and seem to be based in the Philippines. They are very aggressive and while $5 a keyword per month is not that much, they recommend buying 20,000 keywords which IS a lot. They insist they don't use doorway pages, but when they described their methods, it's clear they do, along with adding client links to their network of sites.
They claim to have about 20,000 sites to make things work for clients (20,000 page-one SE listings), and I don't doubt they do since I have a list of about 200 of their sites that I found. Here are some of their sites and if you look at the source on their home pages you will see many things that should raise a red flag:
world-expos.com
webfinancialadvisory.com
assetmanagementconnect.com
assets-tracking.net
aeonetinc.com
corporate-internet-branding.com
When I say they are aggressive, I mean that they don't take "NO" for an answer. I had to hang up on them 3 times before they gave up.
Thanks,
Chris Nielsen
mesothelioma-search-engine.com
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