Blog Directories Still Worth Submitting To

Read the Cost column more sceptically here than anywhere else on this site, because in this category the real cost is often not money.

A listing that is free in cash but asks for a link back is the most expensive thing on this page. You would be placing a link on your own site, the one asset you fully control, in exchange for a listing on a site nobody visits. Any entry that asks for this is marked, and our advice is to decline.

Next, compare authority with traffic. Some sites in this category have strong authority built up years ago and almost no visitors today, which is what an abandoned directory looks like in a table. High authority with near zero traffic is a warning sign here, not a bargain.

If your blog is brand new, this page can help you, but only in a narrow way.

A site with no links at all has to be found before it can rank. A handful of listings on maintained directories gives search engine crawlers (the bots that discover pages) somewhere to find you from. That is worth something on day one and almost nothing by day ninety.

So submit to the small number of survivors, give each one ten minutes, then stop. Doing this is fine. Spending a week on it is the mistake, because the twentieth blog directory does nothing the second one has not already done.

After that, put your time into writing something people want to link to. You will have read that advice on every link building page, and it applies to this category more than most.

The general blog directories in this table are the weakest part of it. What still works is specific to your subject.

Most subjects have somewhere that people who care about them actually browse, such as a community index, an association's member list or an aggregator that covers only one field. They are not on this page, because they differ for every reader and no general table could hold them all, and they are worth more than everything here put together.

Look for them the way a reader would. Check where the blogs you read are listed, what their about pages link to, and what the communities you already belong to maintain. If you are not part of one yet, joining one will do more for you than any directory.

Then, if it fits, add two or three entries from this table as a baseline, not as your main plan.

People still sell this service, and the pitch sounds reasonable, so it helps to know why it keeps going.

It keeps going because it is easy to sell and easy to deliver. Two hundred submissions is a number you can count, a script can do the work, and nothing visibly bad happens afterwards. Nothing visibly good happens either, but by the time anyone checks, the invoice has been paid.

What you end up with is a few dozen listings on sites with no readers, some of which will ask for a badge on your site, plus a report with two hundred rows. You do not get visitors or any change you can measure.

The part to refuse outright is the reciprocal badge. The rest of the package just wastes your money, but the badge puts your own site on the wrong side of a published Google policy.

Expect very little, and expect it fast. A blog directory listing is a five minute form that leads to a page almost nobody will open. If you go in expecting traffic, you will be disappointed.

Expect a fair share of your submissions to go nowhere. Forms that do not send, queues that never move and confirmation emails that never arrive are normal here in a way they are not on the citation pages.

Expect at least one site to ask for a link back, usually presented as a formality. Decline it. The listing is not worth the link, and the request tells you what kind of site you are dealing with.

What you can reasonably hope for is a small early boost in being found at all, if your site has nothing else linking to it. That benefit is real, and it is the main case for using this page.

None of this is based on our own submissions through this set yet, because we have not run that test. It matters more here than on any other page, since the claim that most of these directories no longer work can only be proven by trying them.

Skip this page if your site already has links from real sites. Everything here is about giving a site with no links a starting point, and you are already past that.

Skip it if you run a business rather than a blog. A blog directory listing does nothing for a plumbing company, and the local citations pages will serve you far better.

Skip any entry that asks for a link back, however small the request seems. Of everything on this page, that is the one thing that can actually harm your own site rather than simply waste your time.

And skip the category altogether if you want a steady source of traffic. Blog directories are a one off task for a single afternoon when your blog is new, and anyone selling them as an ongoing strategy is selling volume with nothing behind it.