undefined
Skip to content
Moz logo Menu open Menu close
  • Products
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Pro Home
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Home
    • STAT
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Home
    • Compare SEO Products
    • Moz Data
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis
    • Keyword Explorer
    • Link Explorer
    • Competitive Research
    • MozBar
    • More Free SEO Tools
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
    • SEO Learning Center
    • Moz Academy
    • SEO Q&A
    • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Agency Solutions
    • Enterprise Solutions
    • Small Business Solutions
    • Case Studies
    • The Moz Story
    • New Releases
  • Log in
  • Log out
  • Products
    • Moz Pro

      Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

    • Moz Local

      Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

    • STAT

      SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

    • Moz API

      Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

    • Compare SEO Products

      See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

    • Moz Data

      Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Free SEO Tools
    • Domain Analysis

      Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

    • Keyword Explorer

      Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

    • Link Explorer

      Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

    • Competitive Research

      Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

    • MozBar

      See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

    • More Free SEO Tools

      Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
    Moz Pro

    NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

    Learn more
  • Learn SEO
    • Beginner's Guide to SEO

      The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

    • SEO Learning Center

      Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

    • On-Demand Webinars

      Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

    • How-To Guides

      Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

    • Moz Academy

      Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

    • MozCon

      Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
    Moz API

    Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

    Find your plan
  • Blog
  • Why Moz
    • Small Business Solutions

      Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

    • Agency Solutions

      Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

    • Enterprise Solutions

      Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

    • The Moz Story

      Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

    • Case Studies

      Explore how Moz drives ROI with a proven track record of success.

    • New Releases

      Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

    Surface actionable competitive intel
    New Feature

    Surface actionable competitive intel

    Learn More
  • Log in
    • Moz Pro
    • Moz Local
    • Moz Local Dashboard
    • Moz API
    • Moz API Dashboard
    • Moz Academy
  • Avatar
    • Moz Home
    • Notifications
    • Account & Billing
    • Manage Users
    • Community Profile
    • My Q&A
    • My Videos
    • Log Out

The Moz Q&A Forum

  • Forum
  • Questions
  • Users
  • Ask the Community

Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

  1. Home
  2. Research & Trends
  3. White Hat / Black Hat SEO
  4. Are link directories still effective? is there a risk?

Moz Q&A is closed.

After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

Are link directories still effective? is there a risk?

White Hat / Black Hat SEO
7
9
2.7k
Loading More Posts
  • Oldest to Newest
  • Newest to Oldest
  • Most Votes
Reply
  • Reply as question
Log in to reply
This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
  • binpress
    binpress last edited by Oct 4, 2013, 6:01 PM

    We've contracted a traditional SEO firm, mostly for link building. As part of their plan they want to submit our site to a large list of link directories, and we're not sure if that's a good option. As far as we know, those directories have been ineffective for a long time now, and we're wondering if there is the chance of getting penalized by google. When I asked the agency their opinion about that, they gave me the following answer -

    1. Updated and optimized by us - We are partnered with these sites and control quality of these sites.
    2. Unique Class C IP address - Links from unique Referring Class C IP plays a very important role in SEO.
    3. Powered by high PR backlinks
    4. Domain Authority (DA) Score of over 20
    5. These directories are well categorized.

    So they actually control those directories themselves, which we think is even worse. I'm wondering what does the Moz community think about link directory submission - is there still something to be gained there, is there any risk involved, etc.

    Thanks!

    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
    • Dr-Pete
      Dr-Pete Staff @AlanBleiweiss last edited by Oct 7, 2013, 5:54 PM Oct 7, 2013, 5:54 PM

      Pretty good advice all-around here, but I just want to second Alan that the risk of this kind of focused directory-based link scheme (and it is a scheme, if they've built their own network) is very high. This is white-hat sermonizing. I'll be honest - yes, those links could help you in the short-term, and they could improve your ranking. The problem is that, if this scheme goes down, you will very likely be penalized, and you could lose everything. The SEO company will walk away, but you won't.

      Solid, relevant directories, in moderation, are fine. Worst case, they may not carry the weight you want them to, and they're just part of a larger strategy. When you start gaming the system, though, you're facing the very real risk of a Capital-P Penalty.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • AlanBleiweiss
        AlanBleiweiss last edited by Oct 7, 2013, 5:52 PM Oct 6, 2013, 2:35 AM

        The most important factor here is the notion that you can go to one source for a high volume of links where the cost per link is next to nothing.  We can argue about what "next to nothing" means, however essentially if any link is not placed on a site or directory where the quality, uniqueness, authority, relevance or trust of that site / directory are strong, that individual link is suspect.

        While it can be argued that a new site / directory doesn't yet have authority and thus such a site /directory can still be okay to get a link from, it means the other four signals need to be that much stronger to compensate for that lack of authority.

        If the company claiming to offer these services is willing to provide you a spreadsheet listing all the directories they intend to get links for you, go ahead and look at some of those and judge for yourself.

        Directories are held to an even higher standard in regard to relevance and trust because the overwhelming majority of "directories" out there are craptastic bogus scams created purely for SEO.

        Of the hundreds of thousands of links I have reviewed during client audits this year, I can assure you only a small fraction of links from directories were real, and even a smaller fraction of those provided any value.

        Do not get caught up in marketing nonsense.  Everything you listed in their claims about why you should trust them is a massive red flag to me that you'll get ripped off.

        On a final note, while I am delighted that the previous answers here paved the warning way before I joined this discussion, I need to speak up about the potential for harm.  The potential for a penalty here is ALARMINGLY HIGH.

        Relying on directory links from a company like the one that pitched you is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS in 2013. Most of the site owners who hire me to do a forensic audit have been penalized manually or algorithmically and most of those have had ugly directory link based inbound link profile madness.

        Dr-Pete 1 Reply Last reply Oct 7, 2013, 5:54 PM Reply Quote 2
        • zoicaremus
          zoicaremus @kadesmith last edited by Oct 5, 2013, 3:28 AM Oct 5, 2013, 3:26 AM

          Hello Eran,

          I'm 100% with kadesmith at each point he covers. So we are two now (small community :). I can add a few more things:

          -> It's easy to fall in the "over optimized anchor text" pit when working with directories. At least if they do it like most of the people did it in the past. I had at least 1 website penalized because of these. If I were you I would approach them in this way: I would ask for what details do they need to submit to directories and then check if they would use the same anchor text in all directories. If they use the brand name as anchor text they might be aware of last changes. If not they are probably just doing it to get some money and don't really care for what happens.

          -> link velocity -> is related to the historical changes in link profiles - and it mentioned by Google in some of their patents. If people submit to directories like they did in the past they will get a lot of links in a short amount of time. Google is able to detect this, and at least in theory is able to do some interesting stuff like: temporarily rank the website lower and wait to see if the owner of the website takes action to remove the links. This is not 100% confirmed, but personally I would take it into account.

          So, directories are not necessarily a problem. But if they handle it the "old school" way, then probably it will be.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • NeilBelliveau
            NeilBelliveau last edited by Oct 5, 2013, 1:16 AM Oct 5, 2013, 1:16 AM

            I think directories can still be beneficial if done right and with quality ones. With that said they should be done on a limited basis and not over done.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • trainSEM
              trainSEM last edited by Oct 5, 2013, 12:22 AM Oct 5, 2013, 12:22 AM

              Directories are fine, if they are terribly relevant to the niche and real people use them. They should be added slowly, no more than one per week. This particular offer, therefore, is a waste of money and a possible risk.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • kadesmith
                kadesmith last edited by Oct 4, 2013, 7:34 PM Oct 4, 2013, 7:34 PM

                Sorry Eran, I'll try to address this more specifically:

                1. As part of their plan they want to submit our site to a large list of link directories (First red flag),
                2. and we're not sure if that's a good option (trust your gut).
                3. As far as we know, those directories have been ineffective for a long time now (correct)
                4. and we're wondering if there is the chance of getting penalized by google (small chance)
                5. When I asked the agency their opinion about that, they gave me the following answer -
                6. Updated and optimized by us - We are partnered with these sites and control quality of these sites. (second red flag)
                7. Unique Class C IP address - Links from unique Referring Class C IP plays a very important role in SEO. (third red flag, trying to game the system is never good.  You'll eventually get caught.)
                8. Powered by high PR backlinks (I love buzzwords)
                9. Domain Authority (DA) Score of over 20 (Buzzwords are often code for, "as management, I'm trying to sound like I know what I'm talking about and I hope you can't see through me")
                10. These directories are well categorized. (So are grocery stores...so what?)

                So they actually control those directories themselves, which we think is even worse (it is). I'm wondering what does the Moz community think about link directory submission (sorry, I'm not the community, just a member of it so I can't speak for all of them) - is there still something to be gained there (not really), is there any risk involved (very little), etc (not really sure what you are looking for specifically here, but hope my answers help.)

                zoicaremus 1 Reply Last reply Oct 5, 2013, 3:26 AM Reply Quote 1
                • binpress
                  binpress @kadesmith last edited by Oct 4, 2013, 6:48 PM Oct 4, 2013, 6:48 PM

                  Hi Kade,

                  Thanks for the answer. We are doing all that you said, plus we generate a lot of content internally. We hired this firm specifically for link building to augment our other efforts. Submissions to link directories are only a small part of their offering, and I was wondering what the Moz community felt about it. I hope someone has more specific information to share about this topic.

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • kadesmith
                    kadesmith last edited by Oct 7, 2013, 5:52 PM Oct 4, 2013, 6:23 PM

                    Typically you can trust that gut feeling that says, if it doesn't sound right, it probably isn't.

                    My guess is that this firm has a flat rate that they charge and they guarantee x number of links built per month.  I'd shy away from a strategy like that.

                    I don't feel that you can say all link directories are bad, but I wouldn't spend much, if any, time building links in that manner.  Not sure how much you are paying for their services, but I'd probably take the $200-$400 a month and hire some content creators, a social media manager, or something that has more value.

                    binpress 1 Reply Last reply Oct 4, 2013, 6:48 PM Reply Quote 4
                    • 1 / 1
                    1 out of 9
                    • First post
                      1/9
                      Last post

                    Got a burning SEO question?

                    Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                    Start my free trial


                    Browse Questions

                    Explore more categories

                    • Moz Tools

                      Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                    • SEO Tactics

                      Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                    • Community

                      Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                    • Digital Marketing

                      Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                    • Research & Trends

                      Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                    • Support

                      Connect on product support and feature requests.

                    • See all categories

                    Related Questions

                    • mickburkesnr

                      Dealing with links to your domain that the previous owner set up

                      Hey everyone, I rebranded my company at the end of last year from a name that was fairly unique but sounded like I cleaned headstones instead of building websites. I opted for a name that I liked, it reflected my heritage - however it also seems to be quite common. Anyway, I registered the domain name as it was available as the previous owner's company had been wound up. It's only been in the last week or two where I've managed to have a website on that domain and I've been tracking it's progress through Moz, Google & Bing Webmaster tools. Both the webmaster tools are reporting back that my site triggers 404 errors for some specific links. However, I don't have or have never used those links before. I think the previous owner might have created the links before he went bust. My question is in two parts. The first part is how do I find out what websites are linking to me with these broken URL's, and the second is will these 404'ing links affect my SEO? Thanks!

                      White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Sep 18, 2015, 12:39 AM | mickburkesnr
                      0
                    • ClayPotCreative

                      Real Vs. Virtual Directory Question

                      Hi everyone. Thanks in advance for the assistance. We are reformatting the URL structure of our very content rich website (thousands of pages) into a cleaner stovepipe model. So our pages will have a URL structure something like http://oursite.com/topic-name/category-name/subcategory-name/title.html etc. My question is… is there any additional benefit to having the path /topic-name/category-name/subcategory-name/title.html literally exist on our server as a real directory? Our plan was to just use HTACCESS to point that URL to a single script that parses the URL structure and makes the page appropriately. Do search engine spiders know the difference between these two models and prefer one over the other? From our standpoint, managing a single HTACCESS file and a handful of page building scripts would be infinitely easier than a huge, complicated directory structure of real files. And while this makes sense to us, the HTACCESS model wouldn't be considered some kind of black hat scheme, would it? Thank you again for the help and looking forward to your thoughts!

                      White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Oct 31, 2014, 2:13 PM | ClayPotCreative
                      0
                    • MickEdwards

                      Disavow links leading to 404

                      Looking at the link profile anchor text of a site i'm working on new links keep popping up in the reports with let's say very distasteful anchor text.  These links are obviously spam and link to old forum pages for the site that doesn't exist any more, so the majority seem to trigger the 404 page. I understand that the 404 page (404 header response) does not flow any link power, or damage, but given the nature and volume of the sites linking to the "domain" would it be a good idea to completely disassociate and disavow these domains?

                      White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Jan 21, 2014, 1:11 PM | MickEdwards
                      0
                    • Felip3

                      Does Ezine articles still make any good?

                      In the past many of the articles we posted in our blog we post on Ezine articles. After Penguin still make any sense to post on Ezine? Can the post on Ezine make any bad or Good to our ranking? What kind of tactics are guys using to promote articles/post in your blog?

                      White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Oct 3, 2013, 3:28 PM | Felip3
                      0
                    • NurunMTL

                      Hiding content or links in responsive design

                      Hi, I found a lot of information about responsive design and SEO, mostly theories no real experiment and I'd like to find a clear answer if someone tested that. Google says: 
                      Sites that use responsive web design, i.e. sites that serve all devices on the same set of URLs, with each URL serving the same HTML to all devices and using just CSS to change how the page is rendered on the device
                      https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details For usability reasons sometimes you need to hide content or links completely (not accessible at all by the visitor) on your page for small resolutions (mobile) using CSS ("visibility:hidden" or "display:none") Is this counted as hidden content and could penalize your site or not? What do you guys do when you create responsive design websites? Thanks! GaB

                      White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Sep 12, 2013, 7:47 AM | NurunMTL
                      0
                    • zorsto

                      Should I Do a Social Bookmarking Campaign and a Tier 2 Linking?

                      I don't see anything bad in manually creating links on different (about 50) social bookmarking services. Is this method labeled as White Hat? I was wondering if it would be fine to create Tier 2 linking (probably blog comments) for indexing of the social bookmarking links? Please share your thoughts on the topic.

                      White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Aug 9, 2013, 4:18 PM | zorsto
                      0
                    • Amjath

                      Link Building using Badges

                      In light of penguin update, is link building using badges(like "I love SEOMOZ" badge) still considered a white hat tactic? I have read old posts on SEOMOZ blog about this topic and wondering if this method is still effective. Look forward to feedback from MOZers.

                      White Hat / Black Hat SEO | May 21, 2012, 2:10 PM | Amjath
                      0
                    • RonMedlin

                      Does anyone have any suggestions on removing spammy links?

                      I have some clients that recently got hit by "Penguin" they have several less than desireable backlinks that could be the issue?  Does anyone have any suggestions on getting these removed?  What are the odds that a webmaster on these spammy sites are going to remove them, and is it worth the time and effort?

                      White Hat / Black Hat SEO | Dec 12, 2012, 10:46 AM | RonMedlin
                      3

                    Get started with Moz Pro!

                    Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                    Start my free trial
                    Products
                    • Moz Pro
                    • Moz Local
                    • Moz API
                    • Moz Data
                    • STAT
                    • Product Updates
                    Moz Solutions
                    • SMB Solutions
                    • Agency Solutions
                    • Enterprise Solutions
                    Free SEO Tools
                    • Domain Authority Checker
                    • Link Explorer
                    • Keyword Explorer
                    • Competitive Research
                    • Brand Authority Checker
                    • Local Citation Checker
                    • MozBar Extension
                    • MozCast
                    Resources
                    • Blog
                    • SEO Learning Center
                    • Help Hub
                    • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                    • How-to Guides
                    • Moz Academy
                    • API Docs
                    About Moz
                    • About
                    • Team
                    • Careers
                    • Contact
                    Why Moz
                    • Case Studies
                    • Testimonials
                    Get Involved
                    • Become an Affiliate
                    • MozCon
                    • Webinars
                    • Practical Marketer Series
                    • MozPod
                    Connect with us

                    Contact the Help team

                    Join our newsletter
                    Moz logo
                    © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                    • Accessibility
                    • Terms of Use
                    • Privacy

                    Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.