In 2009, when the Global Financial Crisis hit, hundreds of thousands lost their jobs. Many of these were Sales and Marketing personnel who knew how to sell if only they had something to sell. Many turned to the internet to make a living and many succeeded by hosting their own websites. With hundreds of websites sprouting like mushrooms everyday, the biggest problem now among webmasters was how to get browsers to visit their site. The problem was that with all the websites online, search engines have to set some sort of priority for their directory listings. Alphabetical order just was not a good enough criterion. Some good websites soon ended up in the last pages of these directories because they became the last sites to be “recommended” by the search engines.

In order to survive, webmasters have resorted to making more directory submissions. The problem with this is that logging in and submitting a link for approval and prioritizing by an SEO is a tedious job, so some enterprising people presented themselves as Directory Submitters and do this job for a fee. With fees reaching to the hundreds of dollars, desperate webmasters began to turn to software that automate directory submissions.

Cheaper and faster than manual submissions, automatic directory submission software are capable of making search engines accept a website by presenting the right keywords that would hopefully put the website at the top of the list. Very much the same way that buckshot is fired from a shotgun, automated directory submission relies on numbers. With thousands of search engines, many of these are bound to end up at the head of a list somewhere. However, it now becomes a question of which list the entry ended up in. For all you know, the entry could have ended up under some foreign country’s list where the interested customer would not have any means of getting the product delivered to him.

But then, the entry could also end up heading a directory list that could make or break the website. By submitting entry upon entry to all search engines, the software will eventually succeed in doing what the webmaster hopes it will do for him. The only question is when this will happen because with everyone else using the same sort of software and mushrooming websites, it becomes more difficult every day to make it to the top of a list.

All in all, although manual directory can accurately pinpoint the right directory to submit an entry to in order to produce the best results, the hit and miss machine-gun-kelly style of the spraying directory submissions all over the internet means that the automatic directory submitter will be around for a while longer.