About CSS Galleries
There are hundreds of CSS galleries on the internet in various languages. Their goal is to showcase visually appealing websites for design inspiration. Websites usually must be XHTML and CSS valid to be accepted. Most galleries prefer the site not have Flash. Although PageRank is constantly changing, many currently have a PageRank of 4 or higher, which can do a great deal to help your site.
CSS Gallery Analytics
When submitting to galleries, the first few days after acceptance usually gets you a boost in traffic, after which the visits taper off. Looking at the analytics graph, it is clearly visible that there is an increase in visits, from under 10 visits a day to over 150 visits in 4 days time. The first spike is mainly from css-design-yorkshire.com and cssbased.com. The second spike is mainly from cssclip.com six days later. Some smaller CSS galleries increased traffic just within the first few days of acceptance and some sites gave traffic little by little over the course of many days.
Here is a list of CSS galleries that give the most traffic the first 30 days as well as the time needed for them to consider your site for their showcase after submission. These aren’t necessarily the best galleries, some of which take from several weeks to months to accept your site. These are just the ones that get traffic (and links) more quickly:
- cssclip.com – 125 visits – 10 days
- css-design-yorkshire.com – 121 visits – 3 days
- cssbased.com – 82 visits – 4 days
- cssfreshblend.com – 68 visits – 18 days
- boxedcss.com – 52 visits – 2 days
- csscontainer.com – 52 visits – 2 days
- cssbag.com – 36 visits – 14 days
- css-imagine.com – 31 visits – 1 day
- cssmix.nl – 41 visits – 3 days
- css-design.fr – 32 visits – 2 days
- userinterfacegallery.com – 32 visits – 2 days
Quick PageRank and Links May Get You Penalized (temporarily)
A word of caution is in order when you start submitting to CSS galleries. Be careful not to submit too quickly to many at once when your site first goes live. Submitting to many galleries at once and being accepted to several very quickly may or may not get you demoted in the SERPs, even for a search of your site name.
One company submitted two sites to CSS galleries with two different results. The first site had just gone live and was submitted to about 60 galleries, ranging from popular to almost new, in the period of two days. Within just a couple of weeks the PageRank shown went from 0 to 4. However, at that time the SERP position dropped from the first page to position 76 on Google for a search of the sites name (Yahoo and MSN did not penalize the site). The webmaster requested a reconsideration in Google’s webmaster tools, explaining the reason for receiving so many backlinks so quickly. After another few weeks the site was returned to the first page of SERPs for its site name. The second site was a few weeks older and was submitted much more modestly (a few sites at a time). Within a few weeks it also showed a PageRank of 4 but remained at the number 1 position in the SERPs for it’s site name in Google.
CSS galleries can be a big help with SEO, if you learn to use them properly.
