What’s new in this release:

• a reviewed list of directories with updated pageranks (of course!)
• I have added more discount codes for paid directories and now you get nice deals on a total of 6 directories – and I keep negotiating more all the time
• I have added a section on how to decide whether you need a link from a particular directory – and I’m currently working on a tool to automate this. The tool will be made available to those who purchase(d) the ebook for free.
• as always, I am listening to my readers’ suggestions – Jeffrey Behrendt of AvivaDirectory mentioned in his lovely review of my ebook that it would be helpful to list the best directories – which I do by including a cheat sheet of 15 powerful, established directories to help any webmaster quickly decide what to start with. Let me know if you are happy with it or if I should change anything about this list.

I got more suggestions from my readers than I could implement in this release – but rest assured, I keep working on improvements of my product. Your feedback, as usual, is much appreciated.

Reminding all my current customers to check their email for the update information – and if you haven’t yet purchased the Directory Marketing ebook feel free to do it now.

For such website owners, Patrick Gavin and Andy Hagans, veterans of the SEO industry, have started DIYSEO – a framework guiding them step by step through their site optimization and promotion process. For only $49/month, they walk their subscribers through all the steps required to achieve online success with their websites.

Who is this platform good for? Any small business owner launching a new site on a new domain, or those who’s had a website for a while but never got to doing anything with it. Unless your small business sells viagra, what Andy and Patrick teach you should be enough for you to rank in your niche – especially if you target local market.

Who will not find it enough and would still need dedicated professional attention to their site? If you are in a market with fierce competition, or had your site banned, or purchased a domain that previously had issues, DIYSEO may not be enough to sort it all out. However, there is no need to think that in such cases, you are doomed to spending all of your business’ profits on SEO consulting. Often, once you get professional advice of an SEO (like me) to sort your most serious issues, you can then go ahead and continue working on your site yourself – which is when DIYSEO will come handy again.

DIYSEO also offers a free trial so you can see for yourself if their approach is right for you before you commit to the monthly fees. You can sign up for it here

Yea, I know, it’s been a few weeks since the PR update already – so what took me so long? Several things.

First of all, I did a thorough review of the directory list. All the expired domains have been removed, and as usual, those that lost pagerank have been removed as well. Instead, I added a bunch of new directories – so now the list is over 6,000!

Secondly, it’s been a year since I released the first version of the book back in March 2009 – so I felt I just HAVE to come up with some nice surprise for my customers buying the book. I know many of you must have considered submitting your sites to paid directories (of which there are plenty also in the list that comes with the ebook) but been wondering how you could save on the costs of such a campaign. What I did was negotiate special member only discount codes with two nice paid directories – Aviva Directory and GreenStalk for a total of $45, for any number of site you would ever want to submit. So you pay $19.90 for the ebook – and get $45 in discount codes! Nice or what? Moreover, this update (as well as each update) comes free to existing customers.

Moreover, I will keep negotiating such deals further and provide new discount codes with each new update – so make sure you sign up for the newsletter as you purchase the ebook!

Directory Marketing Reborn ebook can be purchased any time by clicking over to the site, and the existing customers should check their email to see how they can get the update.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: My existing customers who have initially signed up with a gmail based email account may have had troubles receiving the email about this update as my server just had a hiccup processing sending mail to such email accounts – if that’s the case with you please contact me and I will sort you out.

How did this PR update treat the sites? First of all, my list now includes a PR 9 directory – lii.org. It used to be PR 8 but got to 9 this update. Overall, I see many directories which had PR 0 or even n/a obtain PR 3 or even 4. Surely there are some that drop to 0 or n/a – but you get what you deserve. What I notice, though, is that Google has become much faster these days (the effects of Caffeine, I presume) and I have seen sites and pages created 2-3 weeks ago obtain PR 2 and 3 after the update.

Ok you may say this ebook update is not a voluntary New Year present from me since I promised I would update it every PR update – but here is something else many of you will surely like. I have been approached many times by those who ordered the Directory Marketing ebook and those only considering purchasing it, with the same question: are there directories in your list that would suit my [insert your niche here] site? Also, people have been wondering if there is a reliable service that would do manual directory submissions according to the principles described in the ebook.

Well, now you got it! I have just launched a manual directory submission service of my own for those of you who do not have the time or desire to do it themselves but would still like to benefit from the techniques I teach in the book. Since this is my own service, I can guarantee everything is done just like it should for the most benefit for your site. The directories suitable for your site niche are selected from the 5,000 directory list, then your site is submitted to them at the speed most suitable for you, with up to 5 different titles and descriptions, then you get a detailed report so you know exactly what you paid for and what has been done, and what results have been obtained. Nothing like those pseudo “manual” submission services that promise to submit your site to 20,000 directories the list of which you will never see and the links from which you may only be wondering about (and as I have reported already, there is not even such number of directories out these worth dealing with, let alone live ones)!

But it gets even better: for those of you who have already purchased the Directory Marketing ebook or plan on purchasing it, there is a special member-only discount code available. You get it either with the update (for existing customers) or with the purchased ebook download (for the new customers) and can use it to get $50 off the cost of your chosen manual directory submission plan as many times as you wish, for as many sites of yours you wish to submit through this service. Let me remind you that all the updates and goodies are free for the existing customers – all you have to do is check your email box for the info about the update (in case you did not subscribe to the newsletter when purchasing the ebook you WON’T get this info – so if that’s the case let me know and I’ll try to sort you out).

So buy the directory ebook and enjoy the manual directory submission service, and all the best to you in the New Year!

I am happy to announce the third release of my Directory Marketing ebook. After the PageRank update that happened a few days ago, I have updated the directory list, and I have also added some more information about the tools my readers may find useful for their online marketing efforts. The book is now 69 pages long and as usual, the update is available for free to my existing customers who had purchased its previous versions!

As for the last PageRank update: it’s been an interesting one. A number of directories with PR 1,2 or even 3 have lost their pagerank altogether, while a good number of PR 0 directories acquired PR 2 or 3. This is all reflected in the updated directory list, of course. I had to remove those that have lost their value – while, in the meantime, a number of new directories have been added.

You may be wondering how complete my directory list is. We have made some statistical estimates – and it appears that there are only about 450 directories existing in the Internet that are not included into the Directory Marketing Reborn list. Mind you, however, that a large part of these are most likely very new or banned directories with no PageRank (a.k.a. “grey toolbar”) – hence their value for your directory marketing efforts is low to none.

So, my existing customers should be getting an email with the info on how to obtain their free update (check your mailbox!) – and if for any reason you have not purchased Directory Marketing Reborn yet do so before your competitors did and beat you at the SEO game!

Well I am happy to inform everyone that this issue has now been resolved and I have just emailed you all the update download link! Please check your email and get the free update.

In case you have not subscribed to my newsletter when first purchasing the book, I had no way of contacting you. There were not many of you – but if you’re one of these people please ping me and let me know the email you have used when buying the book – I will send you a newsletter subscription link.

Hope you enjoy my updated directory ebook with a refreshed and expanded directory list as well as a special worksheet to track your progress. As always, your feedback is more than welcome so let me know what you think of it and send me all your comments and suggestions.

The ebook is already available for purchase to the new customers. However, there is a slight delay for the existing customers – something is not working right on the processing side with the download URL for you so I am working on it and will be sending you the newsletter with your update download link as soon as it’s fixed – hopefully within a couple hours.

As you know, we have planned to release the tool for keyword competitiveness checks with this update – however we ran into a few cross platform issues. I have customers using different operating systems hence I would hate to compromize and release a partially working tool only compatible with one OS but not another. Right now, we are working hard on resolving these issues and will email you all about the tool release as soon as it’s ready. Just be sure you are subscribed to our newsletter or else we will have no way to reach you!

Does this ebook work? I believe those of you who have bought it have had a chance to test it yourselves by using the techniques described in it to promote your own sites. But just to back it up, here is one more bit of proof it works. I have used the same techniques described in the ebook to promote the site where I offer it. Some four thousand people have found it, and arrived to my sales page. If that’s not a measure of a search engine visibility of a month-old product, I don’t know what is.

On April 15, we will be releasing an updated and reviewed Directory Marketing Reborn, as well as the promised free bonus tool to facilitate your online marketing efforts. As I promised, those who have purchased the book are entitled to lifetime free updates every time I release a new edition.

Those of you who have purchased the book – we’d love to hear your feedback. While some nice amounts of hysterical praise are always welcome, we’d certainly love to her what you did or did not like in our book. Have you tried the method? How well did it work for you? What would you like to be clarified?

Those of you who have not done so yet – don’t let anything stop you. No need to wait for the new release. Get your copy now so you, too, could have a say in what you want to see in the new update. And don ‘t forget to subscribe to the newsletter so you can be the first to know about all the further updates and developments!

Now, I am able to give you a good answer to this question precisely at least for one linkbuilding method – namely, directory submissions. I can tell you how exactly directories should be used for building links to get the most benefit out of it. I wrote a whole ebook about it titled “Directory Marketing Reborn” so that you could benefit from this technique too.

In this ebook I introduce you to some tricks and secrets that only pros know of. It is written in an easy to understand language and contains a step by step explanation of my method so that even a beginner can use it.

Why do I call it “reborn”? – Because I offer a new approach to what many have underwritten as a non-effective link building technique, an approach that can be used for any site, in any market niche.

Check out the Directory Marketing Reborn site to see for yourself what I’m talking about.

Of course, to a site owner, both are equally bad: the site stops getting traffic and customers, it affects the business and results in lack of income. But in reality, a penalty and a ban are two different things and should be treated differently.

First of all, let look at this question: why do sites get banned? (We are looking at Google first of all as it is known for banning sites more than any other search engine).

Google has webmaster guidelines which partially explain what it does not like about sites. Namely, this bit:

• Avoid hidden text or hidden links.
• Don’t use cloaking or sneaky redirects.
• Don’t send automated queries to Google.
• Don’t load pages with irrelevant keywords.
• Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
• Don’t create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.
• Avoid “doorway” pages created just for search engines, or other “cookie cutter” approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

Some of the sites guilty of the above are kicked out of Google SERPs algorithmically, others are filtered out as a result of manual review (here is Google’s guide for manual reviewers that has leaked some time ago and been spotted by Henk Van Ess – a MS Word document). If manual reviewers start coming across certain spammy patterns often enough, the algorithm is tweaked to filter these patterns automatically.

A site banned by Google disappears from its SERPs completely, unlike a penalized site. Having a drop in positions, however bad it is, is NOT a sign of the site ban. Having a PageRank drop is NOT a sign of a ban.

Here is a quick check you can run if you suspect your site has been banned. To start with, search for your site’s name in Google. If it still comes up in the search results you are not banned. If you do not see it there try searching for your site’s URL – if it still comes up in the SERPs you are not banned.

It may be, however, more difficult to identify the reasons of a drop due to a penalty than of a ban. Normally, if your site has really been banned it is obvious from the look at the site itself why it happened. Bans happen mostly due to onsite factors. With penalties, it is not that straightforward and could be anything from your paid link getting reported to a competitor’s malicious activity (an example of which, albeit quite an extreme one, can be seen here).  It has been confirmed by Matt Cutts of Google that negative SEO is possible.

The ways to figure out what caused the ban – or penalty – include, but are not limited to, checking your backlinks and searching for duplicate content. These can be the signs that can help you discover where the problem lies. Other issues may be found in your site’s host possible downtime, unusual activity in your server logs, unfamiliar files on your server, etc.

What are the best ways to fight a site ban? Officially, Google offers an option to submit a reinclusion request once the issues due to which the ban occured have been fixed – but to be honest, a reinclusion request is pretty much equal to declaring yourself defeated to Google. It is much better and more effective for your site to have Google reindex it out of its own will. How to achieve it? Add some fresh content to the site and grab a few high quality links that are as clean as can be.

Should you report to Google sites that have caused you trouble by, e.g., copying your content? It all depends, if your site is older and more authoritative than the duplicating sites it may be unnecessary as Google will manage to correctly attribute the authorship and the original source of the content. You can file a complaint if your content is copyright protected. Otherwise, it will be pretty difficult to prove who’s wrong and who’s right.