Last week I paid $10 to Seobuilding.com for their “Package MD1 – 100 Manual Directory Submissions” as a risk-free experiment.
I was curious to see how traffic you could get from these directories.
During the following week, I received many emails from the directories asking me to confirm my email address so I do not doubt that they actually did the job (Although many directories were suspiciously running with the same engine and some were administrated by the same person)
How much traffic did I get since?
3 visitors.
(Probably from the administrators of directories during the approval process.)
Needless to say I won’t reuse this kind of services. (I will post a comment later if the backlinks start to show some SEO effects.)
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Tags: directory submission, seo
For the benefit of backlinks from directories they can be worth doing a few occasionally yourself, like when you have a few spare minutes every now and then, but for traffic directly from them they are not so useful.
Niche directories can be more useful and also those specific to a country if you happen to be targetting a certain country with your product/service.
Theres an issue over the last few years of very poor quality directory networks, hundreds set up on the same IP and on .info’s with a view to selling them off or trying to monetize with adsense.
There are some decent quality, well looked after and properly edited free and paid directories, not part of spammy networks.
The bad ones are also often setup on dropped domains too, usually with strange sounding names.
Awesome comment John!
I always considered directories good for local websites but you are right that directories can still be valuable if hand-picked.