Submitting url to link directories seen as un-natural link building?

[timthetanker]

Hi I have been a lurker for a long time, so I finally took the step to make my 1st post, and will hopefully start giving back more in the future since I have gained invaluable info from this great site

Background

I hired a new freelancer on our team of SEO consultants ("specialists") During the course a month he (the new consultant) submitted our website to numerous link directories (he assured me this is good), today I received the report of the work he had been doing for the past 4-weeks. I opened the report and I was furious and wanted to sack him there and then

The Problem / My Question

He had submitted our website to 150 directories with various levels of page rank, ranging from 7-1. Most of the directories are totally irrelevant to our niche (we are in the catering business) and he had gone and submitted the site to directories such as "finance busters", "questfinder" etc

For all 150 submissions he used:

• exactly the same url
• exactly the same title
• exactly the same description
• exactly the same keywords

My Concern

Am I right to be worried about this? Or am I completely wrong and may this actually have an effect (even if none)?

The way I see it is that Google is seeing 150 duplicate links coming from irrelevant directories all within a months time, which will trigger a red flag and possibly do major damage to my site, which has always been strictly white hat and been doing pretty well.

p.s does link directory submissions even count these days anyway?

Thanks for reading and advice very much welcome

[CleverPhD]

Directories are not the way to go.  Do you know anybody who uses web directories anymore?  When was the last time you saw a directory rank for something?  I think the last time I saw that occurring it was sometime in the last century.

Will this impact your site for SEO?  Hard to tell based on your overall link profile.  It may make no difference.  If you wanted to be conservative, I would take all the domains and disavow them.  You can also run the URLs through OSE and see the numbers on them.

[donford]

Hi Timothy,

I agree with CleverPHD here, a couple hundred crappy links won't likely hurt a strong brand, and the amount of time it took to get them is not indicative of a spammer. In general 150 links from a true link spammer would be few hours or less.

I will add another thought, up until last year when panda come down it was some what routine for people to still use link directories, and in some case there still are a few industry specific directories that actually make sense.

I would certainly ask your freelancer to look up the Google Panda update and ask him to self evaluate what he has been doing. Hopefully, he will see the light. Here is a decent article over on SearchEngineJournal.com

Hope it helps,

Don