Free Link Directories

Posted by Paul B | August 4, 2008 .

Some of you might have noticed that I’ve added another page to the top, it’s a listing of over 1200 free link directories. It also contains all that other info that’s important, Page Rank, Alexa rank, back links etc

But why would I do this? I hate link directories, buy a domain, buy a directory script and upload. Bingo, you are done. They are 10 a penny. With few exceptions I’ve never really valued their links so wouldn’t want them, never mind pay for them. Whilst that may have been true in the past, in the last couple of months I’ve had my eyes opened up to something that would just be stupid to ignore! I’ve spent years (6+) working on some of my websites, building original content, accumulating links the old fashioned (and slow) way. People who do this, who work the long way are relying on the algos from the search engines to do the right thing, to do what they say do and remove the spam, giving us a chance.

I’ve been fairly royally pissed off then to discover some of my sites being pushed down the SERPs by websites that are nothing more than scraped/re-published content. All of the search engines are aware of duplicate content, but it seems that one in particular can be fairly easily gamed because of its reliance on linking. If somebody can’t be bothered writing content what chance that they are going to the trouble of sourcing proper links, it’s a much more time consuming and difficult job? We all know Google’s bias on back-links in it’s algorithm, it’s also fairly widely known that that isn’t really any such thing as a bad in-bound link (if this was true we could all just scupper our competition). But what I wouldn’t expect is for people to rank well by doing nothing more than getting a couple of hundred back links from free link directories, but yet I’ve seen it happen. It’s not even like it’s part of a linking strategy, I’ve seen well ranked domains that only have back links from directories. I’m not talking about the most popular keywords here, it is after all niche marketing, but it seems that this is a viable and free way of ranking well. Sometimes for very profitable words.

So what are you supposed to do? Me, personally, I started collecting the URLS of link directories from anywhere I could find them. A lot was based on what was causing my competition to rank. I’ve now got a decent list that will accept free submissions. It’s just a case of slowly working my way through , spending 20 minutes a day doing manual submissions. My approved list is slowly starting to build so with any luck I should be started to see the affects of this soon. I can only hope that original content + quality back links + directory back links is better than scraped content + directory back links in Google’s eyes. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

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4 Comments so far

Chris August 5, 2008 12:57 pm

Thanks for the list! If it’s not likely to do any harm then I may just go through it and add some of my sites
Surely if you’re listed on these free directories but also have quality content and backlinks then you shouldn’t have any trouble out-ranking the scraper sites.

Chris’s last blog post..Online Earning and Blog Goals
Paul B August 5, 2008 1:07 pm

I have my fingers crossed that it’s true Chris. It’s gutting to lose rankings to crap.
Directory Submission Service August 13, 2008 5:54 pm

Not all directories might give great back links but if you choose the directories that are not spammed and give SEO friendly links ( dofollow, no scripted links ) your site’s link popularity will improve. A good way to gain links from web directories is finding the new directories and submitting to them when they are very new. New directories are hungry for submissions and your site will be approved very quickly.
Jeet August 15, 2008 8:25 am

Paul.. I maintain a directory list myself (you can see it in the link).. I agree that web directory links are valued very low but we can’t ignore them yet.

You are right about some people doing better SEO ranking better in SERPs when the good sites with useful content are left behind. That’s what got me reading about SEO and link building etc. in the first place.