Directory submissions can be a free and easy way to obtain links to your website.
Much like the Yellow Pages, a web directory lists the contact information of local businesses, typically organised into categories and subcategories, complete with a link pointing to the business’ website.
This link is considered a backlink, which is when one website links to another.
Backlinks are an important part of SEO (search engine optimisation) as they show little votes of support and credibility from one website to another.
Backlinks can pass ‘link juice’ from one site to another, which is a term used in the SEO world to describe the value and equity passed onto another site.
This ‘link juice’ is thought to add strength to the receiving site, showing Google’s crawl bots that the site is worth promoting, and in turn, worth ranking.
A recent leak of Google documentation revealed that backlinks pointing to a site are a significant ranking factor in their search algorithm, stressing the importance of the number and diversity of these links.
There are advantages and disadvantages of including directory submissions in your backlink strategy. We’ve focused on a number of these in this blog.
Advantages of directory submissions
One of the main advantages of directory submissions is the number of valuable backlinks that you can obtain. Quality backlinks from reputable web directories can establish the credibility of your site.
This can help improve the domain authority of your website (a ranking score that predicts how likely a site is to rank against its competitors), which in turn helps improve the visibility of your website on the SERPS (search engine results page).
Google may see these backlinks as votes of confidence and use this as a factor to improve page and site rankings. The more visible you are, the more traffic will arrive to your website.
Submitting a business listing to local directories, such as Yell, Google Business Profile or Apple Maps can help improve the local SEO of your website. This can help improve the visibility of your business in local searches, which can drive the most appropriate traffic to your website.
If you’re offering cleaning services in Chester, for example, you want your business to appear in local searches for Chester cleaning services. Of course, you want to ensure you’re targeting the most relevant keywords throughout the content on your website; however, you can increase the success of your SEO efforts by submitting business listings to local directories.
Many web directories are free to use or have a low-cost submission fee. This means you can build the backlink profile of your website with little to no cost associated.
Disadvantages of directory submissions
There are drawbacks to online directory submissions, including the possibility of obtaining low-quality backlinks from spammy or toxic sites. Such backlinks may have a negative impact on your site’s ability to rank well on Google.
Google may see that your site is associated with a spammy or toxic site, and penalise you.
Focus on quality over quantity
Your SEO resources would be better spent obtaining quality backlinks from valuable sources. The more relevant the backlink, the more relevant traffic to your site. The more relevant traffic to your site, the more conversions.
It’s all well and good spending your time adding your website to directory listings, but how much traffic can you really expect to receive? This is great in helping get your business found, however, backlinks from organic, editorial content will hold much stronger value in terms of SEO.
Some web directories, such as Yell, have ‘no follow’ backlinks. By adding a ‘no follow’ tag to a link, the referring website is telling Google’s search bots that they don’t want to pass on any vote of confidence or ‘link juice’. This may be considered a wasted effort in terms of your backlink strategy, as your site isn’t gaining anything.
An influx of backlinks to a new website may be considered suspicious by search engines. This could lead to the website receiving a penalty, or worse, removed from search results altogether.
Similarly, if a new website has many backlinks pointing to it, all from low-quality sources, the site is more likely to suffer than a larger site with an extensive backlink profile obtaining the same number of low-quality backlinks.
As a website owner, you may be approached by businesses offering to acquire backlinks in bulk from online web directories. There are several disadvantages to this, especially if not approached strategically. This includes having no control over the calibre of links, which may result in spammy or toxic domains pointing to your site.
Web directories could send irrelevant traffic to your site, which could have a negative impact on the bounce rate or user engagement. This may distort the performance data of your site on Google Analytics.
There are associated costs to consider, such as submission fees, manual resources and continuous maintenance. It’s possible that such resources could be better spent elsewhere, such as commissioning content that could help build a relationship with another website or put towards PPC efforts.
In conclusion, there are advantages and disadvantages to obtaining backlinks from online web directories, and it’s up to you, as a business owner, to outweigh the pros and cons.
At Engage Web, we’d recommended focusing your efforts on creating content that matches the searcher intent, meets Google’s Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) guidelines, and is helpful to the user.
In doing so, you’re much more likely to naturally build a portfolio of backlinks from organic sources that will drive the most relevant traffic to your site.
Need some help with the backlink strategy of your site? Contact the friendly team of professionals at Engage Web today.
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