Directory Submission for SEO – Is It Worth It?

As Many SEO’s out there including myself try to use every tool in the chest in order to give our clients/employers the best back link profile. For many years there has been a number of ‘top SEO directory’ lists that quote many sites as being the best in class for providing listings that help improve your Google search position. In recent years directory owners have noticed that there’s a great potential revenue stream for paid directory submissions, possibly as they see paid submission as a way of telling Google that their site is a growing concern and a serious business as opposed to the many rubbish directories that popped into existence back in the 00′s as a way of building a pseudo-authoritative site on a particular niche.

I thought it would be beneficial to put some of these rock star directories through my basic back link qualification process to see if any of the big names actually deliver on their promises. As a caveat I’d like to point that this research was conducted to determine a directories benefit to organic search placement and does not in any way reflect the traffic driving capabilities of such directories. In addition I’d like to point out that I’ve picked the ‘best’ category for my listing, this being the one that most accurately reflects the target sites content (in this case furniture/living room furniture/sofas etc)

Key

dR

Domain Rank (Via OpenSiteExplorer)

IBL

In Bound Links – The number of unique domains linking to the sites home page

pR

Googles PageRank

pR: N/A

No PageRank i.e. Grey Bar

OBL

Out Bound Links from this page

Data

Analysis

The key to this research is whether the page on which your listing is places is indexed by Google and has any PageRank to pass onto your site. As you can see in a vast majority of cases this is what lets these sites down. Of course you could attempt to ‘game’ the directory owners into putting your link onto a less relevant page (in this case it could be antiques/antique furniture etc) and a pR search using the SEOChat tool will certainly show you what pages have the highest PageRank for this purpose.

So what’s my advice? Firstly to Directory owners, it’s no good saying your a pR9 directory if you’re listings pages aren’t in the Google index. So work through your sites to ensure each page has adequate content and reduce the number of links off a page i.e. think more about your category structure. For SEOs and Directory submitters, don’t waste your time or money on directories that aren’t passing juice.

And finally. I know the Google toolbars measure of PageRank is not a great indicator however is it is the standard rule of thumb and as this is a quick guide, it should serve most peoples purpose.