Free Directories - Yes or No?
-
Clearly, we see that high authority directories like Dmoz.Org are effective, even if this big monster is practically dead because of how unresponsive it is.
What about other free directories? Is it worth obtaining as many listings as possible in the free directories? what about the paid ones? Is this still good SEO strategy if the directories have at least a PR3-4 or many cases higher?
I'm asking this for an established site, so I understand that it won't help for deep-linking and anchor text, but will it help anyway to get links from these?
- If you like this post, help me out by giving me a Big Thumbs Up!
-
Just updated our "About Us" page. Thank you for sharing that. I believe that will help significantly!
If anyone is curious to see it, it is here: http://www.aboutus.org/ApplesOfGold.com
-
true. thank you for the response!
-
I typically work according to a 1:2 ratio - for every 1 directory link I build (niche-specific), I build 2 links from other link sources. This seems to work well for us.
I think there are still some really good natural directories out there (that aren't just for SEO), so I'd be surprised if Google didn't take into account directories.
-
free directories doesnt help much with ranking in my opinion.
But I still recommend obtaining links from them mostly for link diversity and because the search engines kinda expects a good site to be listed in directories but Im pretty sure they dont help much in the rankings alone
-
Free directories still have their place IMO.
If I were you, I'd have a look at aboutus.org and read a bit more on this page - http://www.aboutus.org/DoFollow. Quality links from a quality domain.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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.
Related Questions
-
Directory with Duplicate content? what to do?
Moz keeps finding loads of pages with duplicate content on my website. The problem is its a directory page to different locations. E.g if we were a clothes shop we would be listing our locations: www.sitename.com/locations/london www.sitename.com/locations/rome www.sitename.com/locations/germany The content on these pages is all the same, except for an embedded google map that shows the location of the place. The problem is that google thinks all these pages are duplicated content. Should i set a canonical link on every single page saying that www.sitename.com/locations/london is the main page? I don't know if i can use canonical links because the page content isn't identical because of the embedded map. Help would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nchlondon0 -
How to outrank a directory listing with high DA but low PA?
My site is at 4th place, 3 places above it is a gumtree (similar to yell, yelp) listing. How can you figure out how difficult it would be outrank those pages? I mean obviously the pages would have low PA and they are top based on the high DA of the site. This also seems to go back to keyword research and difficulty, when I'm doing keyword research and I see a wikipedia site in top 5 rank, or a yell.com or perhaps an article in forbes.com outranks your site. Typically the problem seems to be Google giving a lot of credit to these pages rankings based on the high DA rather than PA of the pages. How would you gauge the difficulty of that keyword then if the competition are pages with very high DA which is impossible to compete with but low PA? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | magusara2 -
Sub-directories or Nah
Hey MOz Squad, So I have a locksmith company with 7 locations all up and down the west coast. We set up each location in a sub-directory (mainly because they used to have other websites for these locations and we wanted to try and keep the juice so we 301 redirected back to these subdiretories) But it's making our efforts so tough because every time I want to change something I have to do it seven times! DO the sub directories really matter that munch for rank? One of my partners says google treats it like it own website and trying to rank just a page on a website for a certain city is harder. What do you guys think Keep the subs or ditch em?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Meier0 -
Low on Google ranking despite error-free!?
Hi all, I'm following up on a recent post i've made about our indexing and especially ranking problems in Google: http://moz.com/community/q/seo-impact-classifieds-website Thanks to all good comments we managed to get rid of most of our crawl errors and as a result our high priority /duplicated content decreased from +22k to 270. In short, we created canonical urls, run an xml sitemap, used url parameters in GWT, created h1 and meta description for each ad posted by users etc. I then used google fetch a few times (3 weeks ago and last week) both for desktop and mobile version for re-approval. Nothing really improves in google rankings (all our core keywords are ranked +50)since months now: yet yahoo and bing organic traffic went up and is 3x higher than google's. In the meanwhile we're running paid campagins on facebook and adwords since months already to keep traffic consistent, yet this is eating up our budget, even though our ctr and conversion rates are good. I realize we might have to create more content on-site and through social media, but right now our social media traffic is already around 50% and we are using more of twitter and google+ as well since recently. Our organic traffic is only 14%; with google only a third of that. In the end, I believe this breakdown should look more something like organic 50%-70%, (paid)social,referral and direct traffic. 50%-30%... I can't believe we are hit by a penalty although this looks like it is the case. Especially while yahoo and bing traffic goes up and google does not. Should I wait for a signal once our site is "approved" again through GWT fetch? Or am i missing something that i need to check as well to improve these rankings? Thanks for your help! Ivor ps: ask me for additional stats or info in a pm if needed!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ivordg0 -
Whats the best way to revive a directory that was 301'd and now I want to remove that?
Last year i 301'd one of my directories on my site, pointing everything to a different directory. Long story short I am going to sell this product line again and would like to just remove the 301 to that original directory, but I am reading that the 301s are also cached in most browsers for a long time. Has anyone successfully done this and if you did what was it that you had to do? Thanks Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SandyEggo0 -
SEOMoz Paid Directories List.... Are paid links always bad?
We all know paid links are bad.... so it begs the question.... why does the SEOMoz directory list have so many directories that only submit businesses for a fee.... i.e. a paid link. Are they worth paying for or not? Interested to hear peoples thoughts and experiences with some of the directories listed on the SEOMoz directory list....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnW-UK0 -
URL Structure for Directory Site
We have a directory that we're building and we're not sure if we should try to make each page an extension of the root domain or utilize sub-directories as users narrow down their selection. What is the best practice here for maximizing your SERP authority? Choice #1 - Hyphenated Architecture (no sub-folders): State Page /state/ City Page /city-state/ Business Page /business-city-state/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knowyourbank
4) Location Page /locationname-city-state/ or.... Choice #2 - Using sub-folders on drill down: State Page /state/ City Page /state/city Business Page /state/city/business/
4) Location Page /locationname-city-state/ Again, just to clarify, I need help in determining what the best methodology is for achieving the greatest SEO benefits. Just by looking it would seem that choice #1 would work better because the URL's are very clear and SEF. But, at the same time it may be less intuitive for search. I'm not sure. What do you think?0 -
Competitors and Directory Links
Hi guys, wanted to get some input and thoughts here. I'm analyzing many competitor links for a specific client (even other clients actually as well) and come across a pretty heavy directory backlink profiles. has anyone here had success with directory listings? Seem many of the competitors backlinks are coming from directories. What say you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PaulDylan1