Are free directories worth the effort

On linkbuilding

February 4th, 2008 Jason Posted in links, seo | No Comments »

We’re off on a serious linkbuilding campaign for a couple of our sites in Q1, and I’ve been boning up on the current opinions about the process.

It’s interesting that SO MUCH of what counts as SEO these days seems geared either towards mom and pop sites (start a blog, make widgets and funny videos, get eight million links), or to bloggers wanting to make a buck out of AdSense (use digg, use stumbleupon, whatever, get eight million links). I’m not saying that common linkbuilding strategies WON’T work for a big corporate site, but I think the game is different. For one thing, there’s going to be a whole lot more at stake any time somebody in marketing gets an idea to do a silly video or a widget that might be a valid bit of linkbait, and it’s going to take a whole lot more buy-in to get it done.

But there’s loads of considerations in a simple linking campaign as well, and what I’m particularly considering at the moment are free directories.

Directory links are recommended, and a dime a dozen. Or less, since there’s so many free sites out there. So, given a target of x number of links in x weeks, go for the low-hanging fruit, right?

I’m pretty skeptical.

First off, some of our sites are pretty powerful already. Is there really going to be a return on getting a link in that free directory? For our smaller brands, there may be value to free directory listing simply in building visibility, but our focus, first and foremost, must absolutely be to protect the brand, and thus we need to be extra diligent in how we source those links.

So, I’ve been driving the team to do really do their research on a directory before submitting for a link.

How relevant is the directory? Is it really just a random collection of links, or is it a site which is actually useful to a user?
More specifically (for us), how relevant is it to the UK, and to our brand site?
What kind of link will it provide? Direct? Nofollow? Redirect?
What kind of traffic does the directory have? Any?
Does anybody actually link to it?
Does it allow links to adult/hacker/poker sites? (All potentially bad neighbors)
Does it live on a shared server with adult/hacker/poker sites?

Really, these are all valid questions that anyone doing link development for any site should be considering. Are free directories worth it?

The relevance question is a huge one. We can be way better about finding opportunities than a listing of free directories (and in fact we are…). Anybody can find a list of free directories and claim 20 new links in a month. What else can we do?

To that end, I’ve also been doing a lot of reading to get my head back in the flow to start really pushing them to get creative, and here’s a few linkbuilding articles that I’ve found particularly worth the read in the last week or so.