Do Not Submit To Directories, Says Google

It looks like Google has went through and updated their Webmaster Guidelines and omitted a few key elements. One of which at one point encouraged the submission of your site to relevant directories, that line has now been removed.

Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Unlike other Search Engines Google has always been down on paid link placements and other unnatural link building techniques. This type of behavior circumvents their own efforts to remove sites that attempt to game the system. Apparently they now feel that directories are a direct threat to their algorithm.

SEOQuake For FireFox

If you are like me time is valuable and time spent researching a competitor could be better time spent marketing, fishing, sleeping, whatever. There are tools available to help with this process and SEOQuake is a great add-on for FireFox that helps automate a lot of the leg work and will produce instant data in your browser, simply by surfing to a page.

SeoQuake is a programme, which allows user to view a large number of SE parameters on the fly. SeoQuake for Mozilla Firefox consists of three functional parts: SeoToolbar (requested parameters are shown in a separate toolbar in the browser), Seobar (requested parameters are shown in a separate, fully customizable with CSS, HTML block) and output of requested parameters on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

The developers of SEOQuake were bold enough to produce the plugin for IE users as well, which can be downloaded here.