Where to submit?

[james2007]

If one is more interested in traffic than link juice what are the top places to submit my general directory to? Directory Critic and VMOptions have both been good but Directory Rate has been a flop. Budget is limited.

[temi]

I will actually suggest that you are adventurous and digg our new directories yourself via the search engines.

Most directories you find at the mentioned sources paid in cash or kind to be listed there.

[BlueBoden]

You should avoid payed listings, because paying only for the link is worthless, and then i don't care much about how high the PageRank is from the offering site. Another reason is that you risk getting penalized by google.

You can get tons of BackLinks for free, so there really isn't any good reason to pay for those links.

The only time where paying for a link would be worth it, would be for the traffic gain. Having a no-follow in place on such advertising links, should avoid running into trouble with google.


Good places to get traffic from would be on other relevant websites, and places where your link doesn't appear to be advertising. You can also post relevant links to forums around the net, most forums don't mind you doing this.

I have a good flow coming from Yahoo Answers, they do however apply no-follow, so me posting there has only been for traffic, as long as you keep your links relevant, and don't post your link in every answer, there shouldn't be a problem. Even answers with no links may still point people to your profile, you can then include a link in your profile.

The main problem is the automated spam bots, and people posting links to low-quality blogs with little to no original content. Their Guidelines however do allow that you sometimes include links to your own website, see also Can I post my website, email, or personal information in my answers? Yahoo Answers is likely to provide you with a steady flow, even from old answers, note how often answers from YA appear in Serps.


Finally we have places like blogs, and stumbleupon. Blogs provide very low traffic compared to Yahoo answers and stumbleupon, but some allow do-follow links, which may be of some use.

Stumbleupon provide a huge traffic spike, in a short time. But the value of the traffic is near-worthless. I suspect that its mostly a toy. If you want to maintain a traffic flow from such sites, then you should aim to get on their top listings. Promoted links have the potential to provide traffic even after the campaign has ended, but the costs can be huge. Promoted links are to expensive, so i recommend staying away from them, you can quickly burn away a few 100 dollars that way, with little to no gains at all. A lot of sites on their top listings are of little value, so its likely they made it there by promoting their links.


Directories may in rare cases provide a traffic flow, but i havn't honestly found any yet, not even dmoz. But their do-follow links may still be of value, so i wouldn't stop submitting links to them, plus the data may be used by other websites, which may again provide you with even more links. Given that the directory was build with this feature in mind.

Any traffic you gain from directories is more likely to be other webdesigners checking out your site. But submitting your site to them might better your placement in serps, which again might provide you with more traffic.


I would list them as follows, note that the placement of sites like Stumbleupon may differ, depending on lots of things, but it will usually be hard to maintain a traffic flow from such sites.

1: Search Engines
2: Forums (signature links, and relevant posted links)
3: Yahoo Aswers (Profile links and Posted links)
4: Blogs (Website link and posted links)
5: Guestbooks (Website link and Posted Links)
6: Other (Stumbleupon, Digg, etc.)
7: Directories (In rare cases)

How to find them? Use Google, thats how i do when I'm linkbuilding. Also note that there are tools to find do-follow blogs, though i rarely use them myself. Mainly because i don't want to post on blogs, unless i really got more reason then a backlink.

[chriscash01]

BlueBoden is right CHEERS!!!