UK SEO and Internet Marketing Forums
The Most Effective Directories

OK, so we all know by now that PageRank means absolutely nothing to a true SEO professional and what we should really be concentrating on is the bread and butter of it; the SERPS in combination with niche keywords. i.e are people actually going to FIND the website rather than it just siting there with a pretty green bar at the top of the page.

To make sure we have all the most effective keywords we can use very useful tools like WordTracker, but wouldn't it also be useful to know what directories people have found to be most effective for particular industries/geographical regions/other niches? At the end of the day it's fairly likely that most of the directories we submit to are largely ineffective as far as SERPS are concerned, so wouldn't it be more efficient if we all knew the best places to go to start with.

In your experience, is it worth spending £50 - £100 per year for a link on some directories, and if so which are the best? Is it a case of the more you pay the more effective the link is? I severely doubt it. If not, which free directories have you used effectively? Where do you draw the line between directory and link farm? I just feel that now we know that quality matters much more than quantity, it would be useful to know where the quality lies, for everyones benefit.

I know the best kind of links are ones that naturally develop through forum discussion/blogs/article marketing etc, but these methods are not always effective when talking about traditional industries.

I realise people are sometimes reluctant to share this information but I'd like to think that to a certain extent, this forum is slightly different to most in that most people here are here to help others as well as get help themselves (in my experience). Link building is an area where I'm not 100% by any means and there is a lot of blurred lines out there as far as I'm concerned. What does everyone else think? 

I know of two such Directories www.mygreencorner.com and www.joeant.com - it is always also useful to set up a Google alert based on your anchor text and keywords as well as a regular search on your own domain. As google finds these sites every 24 hours you will get an e-mail from Google and you can follow the links it suggests. By linking with those you are adding to your potential internal pagerank. And never forget that even if you cannot get a link from them to you, you can always place a link on a page based on their anchor text and keywords to them.

Just proves if you dont ask you don't get - just by sending a quick e-mail to 'bathrooms.com' to try and get a link to a bathroom client, I managed to get a link within 20 mins! I need some more like that now!

Link building, so essential yet so damn boring! Nice work on the bathrooms.com link.

In terms of directories, I'd tend to look at small specific niche sites rather than some of the 'big' hitters. IMO the better known (a promoted around many forums) a directory is the more likely the links you'll be buying will be downgraded from Google.

I'd rather buy 20 links from smaller directories at £5 each than 1 directory link at £100 any day!

I have a small UK website directory that you or your clients may be interested in. Featured £9.99 with 5 additional deep links or £4.99 with 3 additional links. It got pagerank slapped by Google but i'm 100% the links are passing some value and it ranks top ten for generic searches such as Website Directory in google.co.uk

I'd say almost impossible to harm your rankings with directory submissions (unless your talking 1000's) otherwise we'd all be outsourcing the work to Asia to hamper our competitors. 

Because you might waste your money on useless links that will not benefit your site at all.

If you have a tight control over your link building you can ensure reasonable quality and relative links, rather than relying on the perspective of another person, particularly if outsourcing to foreign countries its difficult to be sure of the quality you might receive.

Also Tom people do outsource link building, did'nt you mention you were link building for a bathroom client? 

The most effective directory (and expensive) listing I have seen as far as ranking goes is Yahoo.  I was monitoring some keywords which were fairly competitive and after the site got listed in Yahoo directory - they jumped from  about 68 to page 1 -.
Don't see much traffic from it but definitely impacted how the site ranked for keywords.

I have seen the joeant directory recommended before as well.

Neil

I did the Yahoo Directory thing 7 years back -The cheeky sods tried to bill renewal fees.  Well either it was a clever spammer or greedy Yahoo - I never paid it.  And guess what?? It's still listed.  Would I do it again?  No way Jose.

My site is ancient now and runs itself - we do the odd update - it self links as directories and sites find it. It still has 700 page one results.  But the mortgage market's dead!!  - I'm doing other things these days.