The Low-Down on Free Directory Submission Value
Submitting to free directories is not of overall great value if you want to get your website past a PR2 or PR3 and generate traffic.
Why?
In general free directories are of lower quality and spend very little or nothing on backlink building and promotion. The problem with free directories lack of value is based on the fact that they usually earn very little revenue and are also bombarded with huge amounts of spam listings. This deadly combination has the real-life effect of having the directory owner spending much of their working hours reviewing and (hopefully) rejecting low-quality listings and also receiving very little if any compensation.
Running a web directory takes up resources such as hosting, domain name registration and human editing hours. Every time a free listing is submitted it costs the owner some of those resources and most folks can only run at a deficit for so long until it becomes too frustrating and too expensive. That is the reason that a free directories life-span is much shorter on average than its’ paid counter part.
One thing you will notice is that some free directories develop quickly over their first few months of life and they convert over to paid directories. At that time or sometime in the future most free listings are deleted to make room for profitable paid listings. Since the original listing was given for free and the owners already benefited (even if slightly) most folks agree this is a prudent business practice.
Other pitfalls to keep an eye out for when listing in free directories is a large numbers of site-wide links. Again, since the directory offers free listings they have to try and make money other ways and low-cost site wide listings are another way of doing this. 20+ footer links and an additional 20+ column links are not an uncommon sight on free directories. Add this to the fact that the highest inner pages tend to be PR2 or (rarely) PR3 you can do the math and soon realize there is not much page rank juice to spread around.
When looking for free directories to submit to there are two methods which may be helpful. Look for some older, established free directories that have been around a while submit to those first. Approval can take anywhere from a few weeks to a few months (I recently got approved for a bunch of sites I submitted over a year ago to a well-know free directory). Second look for newly launched free directories, where approval times will likely be quick, some might be offering specials on featured type listings and those are helpful for being located on the first page where you are more likely to get page rank. Stay away from older free directories that look stagnant or poorly kept.
A good link building campaign though directory listings should involve a combination of free and paid submission. The free submissions might help a little bit with keyword saturation and the paid will help with page rank, SERPS and even some traffic. It is generally accepted that 20 quality paid submissions are more beneficial than 500 free directory submissions in the long-term.
Just as in much of life you tend to get what you pay for, so don’t base the success the of your new site on free directory listings, do your research and plan your budget accordingly.
