Many so called SEO services will kindly spend your money on building useless directory links. You may think that link building is still a case of “the more the merrier” but anyone telling you that is just giving you a sales pitch for their hopeless service.
This is what Google has to say about link directories:
“If you decide to submit your site to a directory, make sure it’s on topic, moderated, and well structured. Mass submissions, which are sometimes offered as a quick work-around SEO method, are mostly useless and not likely to serve your purposes.” Google – Quality Links to Your Site
So what do they mean? Well, this is simple, sort of. Firstly, they will only value a link from a niche directory or a high quality directory with a lot of content that adds value.
Secondly any directory that automatically accepts a link is worthless. It is very easy for Google to check this automatically (they are pretty good with the techy stuff at Google). So unmoderated link farms directories are a no go, and a waste of time and money.
Mass submissions – some SEO services simply pop you URL and title / description into a program that automatically submits your links to hundreds of worthless phpLD (and similar) link directories. Waste of time and money, again.
So how do you chose a directory? Well, the obvious way is to ask Google. By that, I mean search Google.
Searching Google for your chosen niche (keywords) with “submit link” or “add url” will show up the link directories that Google ranks highest. These are the only ones worth going for.
An example: “christmas cards” “add url” directory – a Google search
Similar searches would be “submit link”, “submit website”, “add website” etc,. etc,
This brings up a list of directories and other sites in Google. One of them is actually called christmassites.net – this could well be the best option, even though it is 8th on the list. It has a page rank of 3 on the home page, not great, but a lot better than 99% (made up statistic) those free directories. It is a US directory, so maybe not so good for UK business sites, but it is a paid directory (so definitely not free / automatic) so could be classed as “moderated” by Google. Sponsored listings are for 90 days, and only $9.99 which seems reasonable. But this leads to a new question.
Paid Links?
Google hates people buying links. One thing that is not clear is what the role of the paid link and paid link directories is. Paid link directories fall under the “moderated” category of directories, but at the same time, surely this is just buying a link?
But then if the directory is not passing any link juice, what is the value for you? I my experience most directories are useless, as least far less useful than organic listings. I have been advertising in the Yahoo directory for several years and probably get no more than a few visitors a month. But, maybe all those links are useful.
My hunch is that Google feels that people buying links on info sites is a sign that they are trying to game the search engines, so that is best avoided. Google make this clear too:
Buying PageRank-passing links or randomly exchanging links are the worst ways of attempting to gather links and they’re likely to have no positive impact on your site’s performance over time. If your site’s visibility in the Google index is important to you it’s best to avoid them. – Google – Quality Links to Your Site
That is crystal clear – don’t buy links. But, my hunch (disclaimer – this really is a hunch, no idea really, could cause you to get banned, although unlikely). Google respects proper businesses, and proper businesses are willing to pay for advertising to get greater market exposure.
So links discovered in directories that are moderated may give you a little lift in the search rankings, as it is a sign that you are interested in paying for direct traffic and not paying to get higher rankings. Sort of ironic, that people who pay for traffic will be rewarded while people that pay for rankings get punished, but the world and the Internet is a funny old place.
Anyway, in a nutshell – directories are good only if they are moderated and relevant to your business.
