Directory submission sites: which ones still do anything

The two kinds of directory

A directory is either a place people use or a place links live. The first kind has visitors, a search function that gets used, and moderators who remove dead entries. The second kind exists so that somebody can list a website on it, and nobody has read a page on it in years.

The distinction matters because search engines make it too. A listing on a directory with traffic behaves like a citation. A listing on an abandoned link farm behaves like nothing at all, and on a bad enough domain it is a liability.

Five checks before you submit

None of these take more than a minute, and together they remove most of a bad list.

• Is it indexed. Search for an existing listing from the directory. If pages of that type are not in the index, a new one will not be either.
• Is there an editor. Open submission with instant publication means the directory fills with spam. A review queue, however slow, is a good sign.
• Does it have a reason to exist. National business registries, industry associations and review platforms have a purpose beyond links. General "web directories" usually do not.
• Is the listing complete. A directory that only accepts name and URL gives you a thin page. One that takes a description, categories, opening hours and images produces a page that can rank on its own.
• Are the neighbours reputable. Look at the ten most recent listings. If they are casinos and payday loans in four languages, you have your answer.

What a listing is actually worth

Treat directory listings as a floor rather than a strategy. Thirty solid listings will not move a competitive keyword, but their absence is visible: a business with no presence in the obvious registries looks less established than one that has them, both to a search engine and to a person checking you out.

The exception is local search, where the major national directories still feed data into how a business is understood. There, consistency of name, address and phone number across listings does real work, and inconsistency actively hurts.

The mistakes that waste the effort

Almost every failed directory campaign fails the same three ways. Submissions are made in bulk with the same 40-word description, so every listing is a duplicate of the last. The business details differ slightly between sites, so the citations contradict each other. And nobody records what was submitted where, so six months later there is no way to update a phone number or remove a listing.

Doing thirty listings properly over three evenings beats three hundred done automatically, and it is the version that can be maintained.

What we have catalogued in this category

Our own dataset holds 149 platforms of this type. 97% of them pass a following link, and 84% are ones a beginner can complete without prior accounts or a verified business.

Counts describe our catalogue rather than the web as a whole. We publish the numbers, not the list: the list is the product.

12 of these are on the free tier

No payment and no card. These are the ones you can open and work through today, and they are a fair sample of how the rest are written up.

Examples of this kind of platform

Names most practitioners would recognise, to make the category concrete: Trustpilot, Crunchbase, Yelp, Europages, Hotfrog, Eniro, Das Örtliche.

Common questions

Read next

• Web 2.0 sites
• Profile creation sites
• All link types