Web Directories That Still Work in 2026

Start with the Link type and Cost columns. Between them they decide whether a row is worth your time, and they are the two details most lists leave out. Seven of the entries below are business listing sites rather than website directories. Manta, Hotfrog, YellowPages, YellowBot, ShowMeLocal and a few others want a business name, address and phone number, and they will either reject a plain website at the form or file it somewhere nobody looks. Check the Address column before you open a form. If you do have a business address, the local citations page covers these same sites with advice written for you. Where the Link type says Mixed, the site gives out both dofollow and nofollow links and the one you get depends on your tier, which the first sweep will settle.

A brand new site has a problem that directories can genuinely help with, and at this stage that problem is getting crawled and found at all, rather than ranking.

Do Ezilon, Jayde and SoMuch, in that order. All three are free, all three are dofollow as far as we can tell, and at all three a person reviews submissions before they go live, which sets them apart from the instant entries. Allow about twenty minutes, including signing up for accounts.

Then stop there. It is tempting to submit everywhere on the theory that more links must be better, but twenty listings on sites that publish anything will not do twenty times what three reviewed listings do. Keep a note of what you submitted and when. In three months you will want to know which of these produced a listing Google actually indexed, and without that note you will have no way to tell.

Kompass and GlobalCatalog organise entries by what you supply rather than where you are, so a buyer looking for a supplier can filter their way to you. That works differently from everything else on this page, and it is the route most likely to send you a real enquiry.

It also makes the form harder. Kompass asks you to pick a classification code before it accepts anything, and picking the wrong one is worse than not listing at all, because you end up filed alongside companies you do not compete with. Give it twenty minutes and read the options properly. If you are an early stage company rather than an established one, StartUs is a third option, though it expects a company story rather than a one line description.

Blogarama is the only entry here that asks for a feed URL instead of a homepage, which tells you it was built for blogs, unlike most of this page. Submit your feed rather than your front page, and choose the narrowest category that genuinely fits.

Then wait two weeks and check whether your entry has been indexed. Blogarama has the highest domain authority on this page, so it is the best single test of whether a strong directory domain does anything for you. If you write about moving country, add JustLanded as well. If you do not, leave it out.

Manta, Hotfrog, YellowPages, YellowBot, ShowMeLocal, Lacartes, Tupalo, CallUpContact and several others in the table are business listing sites. They list companies with an address and a phone number rather than websites. If you have both, they are worth your time, though for a different reason than links.

When the same business details appear consistently across many sites, local search takes that as a sign your business is real. Each of those mentions is called a citation rather than a backlink, and it counts even when the link is nofollow. Write your business name, address and phone number down once, exactly as you want them, and paste that same version every time, because one inconsistent copy can undo several correct ones.

Work through these from the local citations page rather than this one. It covers the same sites with notes on what each one wants from a business, plus some that never appear on web directory lists at all.

Most of the instant directories will approve you, because they approve everyone. Fewer of those listings will end up on a page Google has indexed, and fewer again will pass any ranking credit, because a dofollow link on an unindexed page passes nothing.

So set your expectations accordingly. Directory listings will not make you rank on their own. What they do is help a new site get crawled, become findable by name and stop being invisible, for free and in an afternoon. For a site with no links at all, that is worth having. For a site that already ranks, it makes little difference.

We have not yet run our own submissions across this set, so the picture above is reasoning rather than measurement. When the first sweep is complete, a test report will replace this section with counts and dates: how many were approved, how many were indexed, how many kept a dofollow link and what changed over ninety days.

If your site already ranks for the terms you care about, you can skip this page. At that stage general web directories add very little, and an hour spent earning a link that someone chose to give you is worth more.

Skip it if you are looking for visitors. With the possible exception of Kompass, where business buyers search for suppliers, nobody really browses these sites. The listings are there to be found by search engines, not by people.

If you run a physical business and your customers find you locally, use the local citations page instead. Several of these entries appear there too, with notes on what each one wants from a business rather than a website.

Finally, skip any entry here that starts asking for money. Every directory on this page is free on purpose. Paid general directories were exactly what Google removed from its index in 2012, and there is no reason to pay for the next one.