How to find good lists of directories?

Jan 21, 2010 by

For many people who start to build links in a yet unknown topic, niche or language, the first step will be to look for individual directories by entering special queries to Google. It is a quite widespread method to search for different combinations of some typical keywords of your niche and expressions almost every directory has (e.g. add url, submit link). This is the reason why many directory owners see in their web statistics keywords like: financial consulting add url, add link directory education, cosmetic dentistry free add url, etc. Other, similar method is when you have some idea about the usual taxonomy used to categorize your topic, so you search for a sequence of categories like: “Regional Europe Germany” or “World Italiano”.

The problem with all of these methods which based on looking for certain keywords a directory should have in order to be relevant to your topic is that you will find a lot of inappropriate directories for your campaign, so you will have to dig through a lot of directories which are not useful or usable at all for your actual link building. In many cases the first results Google shows you will be those well established directories which accept only paid submissions, so if you are looking for free and SEO friendly directories these won’t help you too much. The second problem is that during this process you might find a lot of regional directories which accept submissions only from a certain region (try to look for directories of lawyers and you will see that the majority of them only accepts US-based professionals). Even if you sorted out all of these directories it might happen that you submit your links to a bunch of sites where although the submission form works, no one will accept it, since the directory is abandoned long time ago.

Since chances are high that someone has already done the above described labour and has already shared its experiences (here I mean directory lists) with the public, it might be more effective to look for these special directory list compilations instead of searching for individual directories. If your topic is popular enough (for instance if you are looking for UK-based directories), perhaps you’ll only have to go to the biggest specialized directory lists, find the appropriate category and start submitting. If your topic is a bit more esoteric, you will find just a couple of relevant directories there; or if you want to find more directories than these big directories of directories offer, you should use this method:

  1. Find a few relevant directory either by starting with
    1. going through the corresponding topic of Open Directory
    2. going through some of the biggest directory of directories
    3. searching for appropriate keywords in Google.
  2. Go and submit your links to these directories to see whether they fit your needs.
  3. Enter the URLs of two or three good directories you have found useful
  4. If you are lucky, Google will deliver some directory lists to you

If these directory lists have been compiled recently or they are regularly updated, you will be able to harness the knowledge of someone who has already been tried the same thing you are about to accomplish: you will not waste your time visiting paid, reciprocal or otherwise constrained directories, submitting to defunct sites, etc. Unfortunately the older these lists are the less accurate the data will be: many direcories would become paid or shut down in the meantime, for instance.

Caveat: although you can find many useful directory lists with this method, you won’t be able to find all: partly because on many web sites the longer lists are batched, so the entire list spans over more web pages, therefore sometimes the directories you seek for will not occur on the same page, so Google will not find them. On the other hand some of these directory lists are much more sophisticated than just being accessible as simple list. For instance the French directory of directories, Annuaire-info.com has a rather sophisticated form for filtering the more than 3000 links it contains. Since unfortunately these forms with multiple filtering options due to technical reasons are almost impossible to be handled by search engine bots, Google cannot access these filtered lists.

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Simple lists of directories

Dec 15, 2009 by

There are a lot of lists of directories compiled by different webmasters here and there, basically published in personal blogs or in webmaster forums. Although these lists are much less than a directory of directories, they are useful resources if you are looking for directories covering a certain niche. Many times these lists are a kind of by-product of a link building campaign, thus reflecting the experience of the link builder who published that list.

There are certain problems with these lists however: the worst is when someone submits to a lot of directories, and when it is done simply includes all of the directories where he just sent the link suggestions. It’s better when only those link directories get listed which accepted those link submissions. Last but not least the best of all, when a list is actively maintained, simply because the link builder in question uses that list as an everyday tool for link building campaigns.

So when you come across a simple directory list, first check the publication date. If it was published more than a year ago, then chances are high that the list will not be really useful, just because there will be many dead links and some other links where the description will not match the actual state (e.g. a link directory became a paid directory meanwhile).

A typical example of these simple directory lists can be found at http://www.evilscience.org/list-of-free-directories-from-serbia-croatia-and-bosnia/ Although this list was compiled more than a year ago most likely it is still the most comprehensive list of ex-Yugoslavian (That is: Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian) link directories.

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