Directory Submission: Do you do it? – Classical Linkbuilding Tactic #1

By ryancaldwellAdvertising

Directory submission was all the rage when I first entered the linkbuilding space. It seems to have died off quite a bit. But the consensus among those linkbuilders that I respect is that there is still a place for directory submission in your linkbuilding strategy.

What NOT To Do

Don’t sumbit your blog to hundreds of spammy directories. Don’t spend $100 for 100 links in link farms posing as directories. Don’t blindly pay someone else to do your directory submission for you. Don’t waste your time submitting your blog to hundreds of irrelevant or worthless directories.

What To Do

Submit your blog to about 10 good directories. I like to recommend that you find 3-5 general directories and 3-5 niche directories. Finding good niche directories to submit to can take some work. But why not start by doing searches on “your niche directory” or “your niche directories.” If you’re lucky, you may even find a legit article discussing the best directories in your niche.

When it comes to general directories, I tend to prefer sticking with the oldies but goodies, though there are some good startups out there too. Here are a few that I’d recommend:

Yahoo Directory
EatonWeb Blog Directory
Best of the Web (they have a general directory and blog directory)
BlogFlux
Blog Catalog
Open Directory/Google Directory (if you don’t mind waiting a couple years)
Business Directory (if your blog has a business theme)

I used to recommend Microsoft Small Business Directory, but they seem to have gone out of business. Any other directories you’d put on this list?

22 thoughts on “Directory Submission: Do you do it? – Classical Linkbuilding Tactic #1”

  2. getting back on topic though apart from directories there are other authority websites that you can get backlinks easily from. It’s a matter of looking and finding out.

  3. I have a theory about FF – that it’s hamstrung by it’s geek adopters, and that if you want firefox to be as widely used as IE (if not more) you need to ditch that core and go after the masses.

    I started using FF for the tabs, but now I do it out of habit. Once IE brought in tabs, FF lost it’s biggest visible advantage to the average user.

    The ‘average user’ blames the website, not the browser, when something goes wonky. The browser is a tool, owned by the user, it’s one of the last things to get blamed.

  4. Glad you found it Ryan! I admit to using IE7 almost exclusively, because I’m just too used to IE and never got the same feeling with FF, despite trying hard several times. At least there’s a choice now, and FF isn’t all that either if we must believe Wired.

  7. fuck microsoft

    or at least that’s what your last comment was saying, ryan, even if you didn’t come out and say it.

  8. Very interesting. I found the issue and resolved it. Here it is. Major change in form processing.

    [input type=”image” name=”Submit” src=”/img/submit-dark.gif” class=”dashboardsubmit” value=”Submit” alt=”Submit” /]

    Notice that the “name” and the “value” and the “alt” all have the value “Submit” – Well, in its infinite wisdom, IE assigns zero Post variables to “Submit” and instead creates “Submit_x” and “Submit_y”

    So what I was doing was checking to see if someone had registered by looking for whether $_POST[‘Submit’] was set. It was never getting set because of IEs new form processing rules (which I don’t quite understand).

    isset($_POST[‘Submit’]) was returning false under IE7 and true under Firefox.

    Bizarre.

  10. F*ck Microsoft! I spend too much of my life dealing with their damn incompetencies.

  12. You’d think after seven versions that Microsoft would know how to create a compliant browser

  13. Just tried again succesfully with Firefox 2.0. The problem seems to be with IE7. I don’t get the Thank You note after submit. It just displays the form again.

  14. I just tried and registered successfully. Don’t know what the problem is. Did you get a verification email?

  15. Hi Ryan,

    Tried to register at Eatonweb, but the register form isn’t working. After submit I just get redirected to the same form again. Is registering disabled at the moment?

    Thanks,
    -JP

  16. Im glad this practice is dying down. There are soo many directories out there, and does anyone actually use them for finding information?

    I hate the tedious process of finding good directories and then submitting to each for a fee.

    humbug

  17. There are thousands of directories available and submitting to them might not be the best way to really give yourself any PR boost BUT they can help with some search results.
    I have a cycling blog that I’ve been using for some experiments. I’ve submitted a key word phrase that is not contained on the site or in the META desicription or title.
    Over a few months I’ve been able to appear to keep creeping up the SERPs for that phrase.
    So what’s the use for someone. If you had a blog about a certain niche do some research on the well searched phrases. Than start doing directory submissions with that phrase as your title. Long term it’ll help. But remember long term.

  19. yea, eatonweb is good one as well.

    ryan – is that what you’re working on? eatonweb is a solid domain, so the branding aspect is covered.

  21. open directory = dmoz mate.

    i’d go a bit wider and say that you can benefit from a dozen general directory links, such as the starting point directory (stpt.com, i think) and a couple of others (v7n directory as well).

  22. No directory article is complete without a mention of dmoz. Getting listed there is instant credibility in the eyes of Google and Yahoo.

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