So does submitting your site or blog to web directories still work?
Can that increase your search engine rankings?
First let me tell you what is doesn’t work. When someone offers you a directory submission service where they submit to hundreds or thousands of directories then hide your wallet and run as fast as you can in the opposite direction.
Those services usually submit to low quality directories that Google doesn’t like and rarely ever crawls.
What you want to do is submit manually to a handful of good web directories that have a real human reviewing each submission. There aren’t that many of them out there and links from those directories still count and produce trust in the eyes of Google.
Those links won’t pass any page rank for the most part but Google will assign a trust factor to your site if it’s listed in quality directories.
So the question is which ones are good directories?
The obvious ones are:
BOTW.org – Great web directory that every site and blog owner who is serious about his business should be listed in. They guarantee your site will be reviewed by an editor in timely manner (unlike DMoz)
DMOZ.org – Once used to be a great directory and getting listed there still helps but good luck getting reviewed and actually accepted. Just submit your site once and forget about their existence.
Yahoo Directory – Worth every penny and Google crawls their pages all the time. Yahoo directory will also pass some page rank. I have listed a new site there without any other links and got Page Rank 3 on the first update.
Business.com – Well, if you can get them to give you a dofollow link them it’s worth it, otherwise don’t bother. I don’t understand why they changed to nofollow (makes no sense). It’s like saying, “Yes, your site is good quality but we will use nofollow cause we still don’t trust you)
So now how do you find more directories that are still worth submitting to? There are more and you can find them easily using old school methods.
What I usually do (this still works well after so many years) is search for my competitor’s domain name with quotes.
Simply analyze the results by going through as many search results pages as you can and pay attention to directory listings.
Click on them and see where your competitor is listed and submit your site there too. This is sooo simple but so effective. I have done this for many different sites I own and always had positive results.
When a directory you submitting to charges money for submission that’s a good indicator that they manually review sites and Google will count those links (It’s funny that Google counts directory links which are paid links, but not when you buy them from other sites)
Always make sure that the category you are submitting to is indexed in Google. Just grab the url and paste it into search to see if Google indexed it. If yes, then obviously Google crawls that page and it would be beneficial to have your site listed there too.
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